30th Week

30th Sunday 2020

Exodus 22: 20-26; 1 Thess 1:5-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Jesus said “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: you must love your neighbour as yourself.”

All three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew Mark and Luke) record this incident, though the setting varies from Gospel to Gospel. In Mark, Our Lord makes His pronouncement in answer to the “good scribe” who heartily endorses His words, and the two establish a rapport. Luke, on the other hand, describes Our Lord as drawing the answer from the lawyer who wanted to disconcert Him (ekpeirazon), which provides the cue for the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finally, Matthew has the Pharisees, like the lawyer, trying to “disconcert” Jesus—the same word which we find in Luke, though slightly less emphatic (peirazon).

Why do they question Him in this way? They must know that, as a practising Jew, He knows the commandments by heart. Do they perhaps think that He rejects the commandments because of His conduct, especially His healings on the Sabbath, and His forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery?

Jesus does not reject the commandments. Instead He draws out their full meaning and purpose, pointing out that they are all intended to build on and to further the basic demands that we love God and our neighbour. It is interesting that the command to love our neighbour as ourselves is not one of the Ten Commandments; it is taken from the Book of Leviticus. Yet none of Jesus’ interlocutors question His assertion that this, rather than any of the Ten, is to be regarded as the second great commandment, resembling the first.

This makes me wonder why we give such attention to the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. I remember learning them by heart at primary school but not learning what Our Lord said about the two greatest commandments. I must confess that, to this day, I have never coveted my neighbour’s ox: perhaps it is a temptation which still lies in store. Likewise, in older Anglican churches, you will sometimes find the Ten Commandments listed on a board near the altar, again without reference to Our Lord’s interjection.

Both the Pharisees and we, it seems, accept in theory Our Lord’s summary, but how does this work out in practice? Is it not the case that we sometimes find it more convenient to harden our hearts like the Pharisees, taking refuge in rules and regulations, rather than embarking on the more difficult road of love of neighbour?

St. Therese of Lisieux, towards the end of the nineteenth century, commented that she understood why Our Lord spent so much time arguing with the Pharisees, because, she said, “There are still many Pharisees today”. Well over a century later, we would have to admit that very little has changed. The attacks upon the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and, more recently, upon Pope Francis, spring from a desire to hide under a comfort blanket of familiarity, rules and regulations; rather than, as Pope St. John Paul II expressed it, to “put out into the deep”, trusting to the searing wind of the Holy Spirit, whom Pope St. John XXIII invited to blow through the Church when he convened the Council, and to engage with the person of Jesus, and with all those for whom He shed His blood, in love, rather than simply in obedience.

Sadly, even in the higher echelons of the Church, we see people behaving, not even like the Pharisees, but more like Pontius Pilate or Caiaphas, as bishops and other religious superiors refuse to lift a finger in support of priests who have clearly been falsely accused—I felt obliged to suggest to one bishop, not of this Diocese, that it will be very sad if the only person to speak for him on Judgement Day is Pontius Pilate—but before we distribute blame to others, each one of us needs to examine our own conscience, to ask ourselves: how fully am I living out those two basic commandments? How deeply do I, in practice, love God and my neighbour, that neighbour who is Everyman and Everywoman?

29th Sunday

29th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 45:1,4-6; I Thess 1:1-5; Matthew 22:15-21

If, like last Sunday, today’s readings are a jigsaw, they are a jigsaw whose pieces are well and truly scattered. It will be quite a task to fit them together.

Let’s begin with the prophet whom we call Deutero-Isaiah or Second Isaiah, who was active during and after the return of the Jewish people from exile in Babylon.

Many many moons ago, when I was a bright and shiny new priest, I had the task of teaching Ancient History to gangs of hulking Sixth Formers. The Greek History component of the course was entitled “Herodotus and the conflict of Greece and Persia”, and there was often a question on the A Level paper along the lines of “What evidence is there, apart from Herodotus, for the events of this period?”

One important piece of evidence, as I used to remind the lads, was this passage from Deutero-Isaiah. Cyrus was a king of Persia (so a baddie in the eyes of the Greeks) who conquered Babylon in 538 BC, and allowed the Jewish exiles to return to their homeland. So this earthy ruler, a villain to the Greeks, was a hero to the Jews, who saw him as an instrument in God’s hands, carrying out God’s purposes even though he wasn’t aware of it. Indeed, the prophet goes so far as to call him the Lord’s anointed—in other words, His Messiah or Christ.

This is a remarkable title to apply to a pagan king, but it underlines God’s control over the whole universe. Even a powerful ruler, who has no knowledge of the one true God, may be fulfilling God’s purposes.

Here we have a link, albeit somewhat tenuous, a piece of the jigsaw which has to be forced into place, with the Gospel. There the Pharisees, and the adherents of Herod Agrippa (son of Herod the Great) are attempting to catch Our Lord out.

They do this via a question about paying taxes to the occupying Romans. It was an attempted Catch 22. If Jesus agreed that the tax was lawful, He could be denounced as a traitor to His own people, not least because the coinage in which the tax was paid, carried a reference to the Roman Emperor as a god. If, on the other hand, He rejected the lawfulness of the tax, He could be reported to the Romans as a rebel.

Our Lord’s solution to this dilemma is, I think, sometimes misinterpreted. He throws the question back at His interlocutors by asking them, effectively, to whom the coin belongs. As it bears the Emperor’s inscription, it presumably belongs to the Emperor, and may, and should, be returned to him. The response which Jesus gives—“Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”—have sometimes been taken to mean that there are some things which are reserved to earthly powers, and are no business of the Church, but this is to ignore His conclusion “and to God what belongs to God”.

In fact, everything belongs to God, as our reading from Deutero-Isaiah indicated. Cyrus was doing God’s will, even though he was unaware of it, because God is the Lord of all., Similarly, the Roman Emperor belongs to God and is ultimately answerable to God, as are today’s rulers, whether they recognise God or deny Him or, like some, attempt to use Him for their own ends.

Consequently, the behaviour of rulers and governments is a legitimate concern of the Church, which must always advocate justice, as successive Popes have done, through Catholic social teaching, and as the present Holy Father is doing through prophetic documents such as Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti.

It must beware however of being sucked into partisan politics, about which I will say no more.

Finally, there are two sets of three phrases each from St. Paul which we would do well to take away and ponder: “shown your faith in action, worked for love, and persevered in hope” and “the Good News came to you....as power, and as the Holy Spirit, and as utter conviction”.

28th Sunday

28th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 25:6-10; Philippians 4: 12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

Are you any good at jigsaw puzzles? I have to confess that I don’t have the patience. However, we have something of a jigsaw presented by our readings today. Let’s see if we can put the pieces together.

The prophet Isaiah speaks of the Messianic banquet, the feast to be enjoyed in the Kingdom of Heaven by God’s people gathered around the Messiah, the Christ. He talks of a banquet of rich foods, of fine wines. If I get there, I am going to ask for an alternative of real ale, which strikes me as more heavenly than wine. If St. Bridget of Ireland is around, I should be fine, as she allegedly envisaged heaven as a lake of beer—an extremely sensible saint.

Whenever we celebrate Mass we are already sharing in the Messianic banquet, at least in embryo. We are called by the Messiah to His table and are given the most sumptuous food of all, His very self, hidden under the forms of bread and wine.

There is more, though: another piece of the jigsaw to be slotted in. Immediately before communion, before we share in the foretaste of the Messianic banquet, the priest proclaims “Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb”.

What does that mean? “That’s easy,” I hear you cry. “It means that we are about to receive Jesus, who gave Himself to us as food and drink at the Last Supper, AND we are about to take part in the Messianic banquet.”

That is true, but there is even more to it than that. We find the next piece of the jigsaw outside today’s readings in the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. There St. John, assuming him to be the author, is told by an angel to write “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”. (Rev 19:9)

So we are being called, invited, to something which is the fulfilment of the Last Supper and of the Messianic banquet. We are being summoned to the completion of all that is holy, when the glorified Christ, the Lamb of God, is united completely to His bride, the Church. This is far too deep, far too complex, for our limited minds to grasp fully, but it does mean that, in receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion, we are entering into heaven itself, into total union with the Lamb of God. That union will become permanent in eternity, but our earthly communion is a genuine sharing in it, which underlines the tragedy of so many people’s having been deprived, by the pandemic, of that which fulfils us.

All of which brings us to what may be the final piece of our jigsaw, as Our Lord, in the Gospel, tells us the parable of the wedding banquet of the King’s Son. This, He says, is an allegory of the Kingdom of Heaven: we are indeed being invited to that banquet, of which our communion is a foretaste.

As last week, with the parable of the tenants of the vineyard, we have the originally chosen people proving unworthy, with the result that the invitation is now extended to outsiders, to the Gentiles. We are now among those who are invited to that heavenly banquet, in all its stages, in all its manifestations.

That is wonderful news, but it comes with a warning in that postscript of the new guest who is thrown out because he isn’t wearing a wedding garment. Who is he? He is a Gentile, a member of the Church, indeed, who can’t be bothered. He doesn’t appreciate the invitation. He hasn’t taken the trouble to make himself presentable. He represents the person who makes no attempt to live as God would want, who sees the Kingdom as an entitlement rather than as a gift, who fails to respond at any deep level to God’s call. God forbid that you or I should be that person.

Have we completed our jigsaw? Not quite. We will fit the last piece into place only when we make all this a reality, receiving Holy Communion with deep fervour and faith, and responding to God’s invitation in every moment.

27th Sunday

27th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 79; Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21:33-43

Unless it was bearing grapes at the time, I wouldn’t recognise a vine if I fell over it. I recall a previous parish which possessed a very attractive modern set of tabernacle veils. The green one was embroidered with a leafy plant which looked to me like ivy but which, I was assured, was a vine.

To the people of Palestine in Our Lord’s day, a vine would have been immediately recognisable, as viticulture (the care of vines) was an important local industry. To Christians throughout the centuries the vine has had particular significance as the bearer of grapes, the source of wine, which Jesus changed into His blood. We recall too one of His great “I am” (ego eimi) sayings from St. John’s Gospel, “I am the vine” which would have immediately struck a chord with His audience.

Hence, it is not surprising that the vine occupies such a prominent place in the scriptures. Isaiah, writing in the eighth century BC uses the vineyard, and the vines enclosed there, as a symbol of Israel. This is a beautiful passage in which the prophet expresses God’s love for His people, in terms of the tender and skilful care with which Isaiah’s friend prepared a vineyard from scratch, clearing the ground, adding all the buildings which might be needed, and planting the best quality vines.

This is an allegory of God’s care for His chosen people, preparing for them the land of promise, tending them by the work of the judges and prophets, giving them every opportunity to grow and flourish in the love and knowledge of Him.

Yet, says Isaiah, all this love, all this careful attention, have been in vain. The people have let God down. In terms of the allegory, the vineyard has produced sour grapes: this represents the people’s abandonment of God, their worship of false gods, their neglect of justice. In response, the owner will allow the vineyard to go to rack and ruin: in practice, God’s people endured a succession of attacks and invasions, culminating in the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel, and the deportation of the inhabitants of the southern kingdom of Judah to Babylon, the latter event occurring more than a century after the time of Isaiah.

Today’s psalm pursues a similar theme. Once again, Israel is a vine, brought out of Egypt, and planted in a well prepared vineyard. For the psalmist, the destruction envisaged by Isaiah has already taken place. At first, the psalmist claims to be shocked and puzzled: “Then why have you broken down its walls?” Then he implicitly accepts that it is Israel’s own fault, by promising that, if God rescues them from present distress, “we will never forsake you again”.

Our Lord, in the Gospel, produces a parable which has explicit echoes of Isaiah’s allegory. Now however, the villains are not unfruitful vines but murderous tenants, who want to claim the vineyard for themselves. The vineyard is now not Israel but the Kingdom of Heaven, yet it is still the chosen people who are at fault, attacking and murdering the owner’s servants, who represent the prophets, and preparing to murder Jesus, the owner’s Son.

What is threatened is not the destruction of the vineyard, but its transfer to other tenants, the Gentiles, the new people of God. All is fine for us: the vineyard, the Kingdom, is given to us, and all we have to do is to produce its fruits.

Oh dear! Can we honestly say that we have done so or are doing so? Over the centuries have we, the Gentiles, the new people of God, behaved any better than the original chosen people? They, as a people, have suffered persecution at our hands: was that bearing fruit for God? Admittedly, the Church has done many good things, has produced many holy men and women, but it has also been guilty of many grave offences, not the least of which is the clerical abuse crisis. We still have a very long way to go, a massive amount of work to do, if we in our turn are not to deserve the strictures of Isaiah, of the psalmist, and indeed of Our Lord Himself.

26th Sunday

26th Sunday 2020

Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

That Gospel always makes me think of Jim. Jim, who will now be in his mid-fifties, was one of the eleven year olds entrusted to my tender care when I was a bright and shiny new priest, starting out as a member of the staff of Upholland College.

One morning, Fr. O’Neill, the Headmaster, was principal celebrant at Mass with the lower forms. The Gospel was the one you have just heard, and after it, Fr. O’Neill, in good headmasterly fashion, posed a question. “You have heard that parable about the two boys, the one who said ‘No’ and went, and the one who said ‘Yes’ and didn’t go. Now, there could have been a third lad. What might he have done?”

Immediately, some smart aleck stuck his hand in the air and replied “He could have said ‘Yes’ and gone.

“Very good” said Fr. O’Neill and launched into a good, sound headmasterly discourse on saying ‘Yes” to the Lord’s will—and by extension to the commands of the staff—and carrying it through.

While this was going on, Jim was looking, first thoughtful, and then eager. At last he could stand it no more. Up shot his hand.

“Father, there’s a fourth one. He could have said ‘No’ and not gone.”

Fr. O’Neill withered him with a glare. “Yes, well, I don’t think we need to consider that” he replied dismissively, while I was thinking “Oh. That’s the only one that occurred to me. I never thought of the third option.”

Of course it would be better if we were always eager to fulfil God’s will, to leap into action at the first hint of duty. “Let me be slow to do MY will, prompt to obey”, as we used to sing in the hymn “Lord for tomorrow and its needs”.

Or would it? Many of us, I suspect, have a sneaking distrust of those saints who used to be held up to us as paragons of virtue: Blessed Dominic Savio, the schoolboy saint, St. Aloysius the model novice, and others, who seem by and large to have died of a surfeit of piety at a ridiculously young age. What good is a model novice? Would we not be better off with a flesh and blood one? Most of us can probably identify more readily with the backsliding, blundering St. Peter, or with Mary Magdalene, from whom seven devils had gone out. It is difficult not to feel that they would have had more sympathy with the weaknesses of others.

I have spoken before of the late Fr. Tony Pearson, and of the advice given to him by his parish priest—who was, incidentally, Chesterton’s model for Fr. Brown—at the outset of his seminary career. The young Tony was informed that, if he kept all the rules on his passage through seminary, “then they will make you a bishop”: this however came with a postscript—“and Tony, you’ll be no bloody good”. I am reliably informed by his former fellow students that there is one member of the present hierarchy who, in his seminary days, was precisely as described, and I have strong suspicions about another: it goes without saying that they are currently demonstrating the truth of that parish priest’s words long ago.

So am I encouraging people to be disobedient, wayward, sinful? No, I am suggesting that anyone who doesn’t feel the tug of sinful Adam, who invariably responds to the whispering of the Lord and the stirrings of conscience with alacrity and enthusiasm, is almost certainly lacking a roundness of character, an element of humanity, and a capacity for genuine sympathy with the struggles of lesser mortals. There is a danger that the compassion (cum passio, suffering with) which Jesus demands of His disciples as being an attribute of God Himself, will be lacking.

Do not be discouraged then if your own response to the promptings of the Lord strikes you sometimes as somewhat sluggish, provided you get there in the end. After all, Our Lord didn’t mention Fr. O’Neill’s imaginary third boy, and we are not called to be more Christlike than Christ Himself.

25th Sunday

25th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20-24,27; Matthew 20:1-16

What time is it? I mean, what hour is it in terms of working for the Lord? Is it early, or late, or the middle of the day?

Looking around the Deanery, I would be inclined to say that, in terms of the clergy, at least, it is getting on a bit. I think that I am right in saying that you could fit those under 60 into a phone box, assuming you could find one. And raising our sights to the whole Diocese, the picture is very similar.

Most of the clergy, and indeed of the consecrated religious and active laity, have far less time ahead for service of the Lord than has been available to us in our past.

Does that mean that we can pat ourselves on the back, and congratulate ourselves on work well done? Does it heck as like! We may have had plenty of opportunity to labour in the Lord’s vineyard, but have we made the best use of it, whether as priests, deacons, religious or lay people?

Those of us who are priests emerged from the seminary, most of us decades ago, confident that we were just what the Church had been waiting for. Full of zeal and enthusiasm, we were the people who would build the Kingdom of God, who would set the Diocese on fire. Many lay people too had a great vision of service of God and of His people, and have been and are faithful to that vision.

Yet the picture is one of retrenchment and apparent decline which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. So, have we not been working hard enough? Have we been working in the wrong way?

I suspect that only God Himself can answer those questions: no one is ever the best judge of his or her own case. My own feeling is that people have been and are doing their best: that clergy, laity and religious alike are working as hard as, and in some cases harder than their predecessors, despite the sneers of a few cynics who hanker after an imaginary lost Golden Age. Like the recent Golden Generation of English footballers, the Golden Age of the Church in England comprised more myth than substance, and it contained a fair amount of cruelty and abuse, alongside much that was good.

The principal issue that we face is that society has changed beyond recognition in the last half century or so, and these changes, especially in the area of sexual behaviour but also in the growth of a sort of superstitious scientism and pseudo-rationalism which push God to the margins, have dealt hammer blows, not only to the Church, but to the whole concept of the place of religion in the world.

I have mentioned before my conversation with the Methodist chaplain to Beaumont Hospital, where I had my tonsils and adenoids removed shortly before my eleventh birthday in 1961:

“Whereabouts are you from?”

“Scotforth.”

“Oh, I often go there to preach at Greaves Methodist Church. Do you go there, or do you go to St. Paul’s?”

“No. I go to St. Bernadette’s.”

This gentleman’s assumption that a ten year old would be going to church somewhere, perfectly natural sixty years ago, would be inconceivable today.

So what do we do? We keep on working, and we keep on trusting, not in ourselves, our own efforts, our own plan, our own vision, but in the God who has called us, and who continues to call us, to labour in his vineyard. Whether we have joined the workforce early or late does not matter. What wages we shall receive is a matter for God. All that matters is that we, at least, remain faithful to our calling: that, until the day ends, we continue to work faithfully in whatever situation we find ourselves, and that we remain alert, even to the very last minute, to the guiding call of God.

24th Sunday

24th Sunday 2020

Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

“Resentment and anger, these are foul things, and both are found with the sinner.”

“Tell me about it”, to use the modern idiom. If you want resentment, I can show you resentment: if you want anger, I can give you anger.

Let me see the news headlines, and I will give you enough anger to sink the proverbial battleship. Is there something there about politics? I will reach a red hot pitch of anger in two seconds flat. Is there something about AMERICAN politics? Dive for cover before I explode, even though it isn’t strictly my business. Does the Church appear in those headlines? You can guarantee that there will be something to make me blow off steam enough to power a large sized boiler.

Then there are the sports headlines: once again there will be enough to inspire rage and fury, and if you actually take me to a match, then on your own head be it. Better turn then to something less controversial: this Facebook page “Lancaster Past and Present” will be nice and soothing. WHAT? How can anyone be so STUPID as to say that about that building? What does that idiot know about what went on down that road in that decade? I knew about that before this clown was born!

Right: that’s enough about anger. What about resentment? You can have that in bucketsful, and I can tell you exactly when and what it springs from. Picture the twelve year old me, sobbing over my Greek homework, unable for the present to make head or tail of it. My father comes through from the shop, where he is still working, even though it is seven o’clock at night, and he has been at it since seven this morning, as he will be every other day of the week, every other week of the year, apart from Wednesdays, when he will close at dinner time (12.30) and Sundays, when he won’t begin until after early Mass, and will close at 5.30 in time to go to Benediction. Oh yes, and he will also be closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and Good Friday, though Boxing morning will be devoted to stocking up ready for next day, and Good Friday afternoon will be spent in church.

Anyway, he comes through, and says, very gently, “Just do your best. I don’t want you to end up like me.”

WHAT???!!! The best man in the world, yet society regards him as of no account, yet that little minority gaggle of thugs on the school staff, of whom I think that every boys’ school of that era had its share, is highly respected by that same society. So there was born my resentment of the way society operates, and my inverted snobbery with which I have struggled ever since.

So there it is, and there am I, and there are you, each with our own quota of anger, and resentment, and bitterness. Or perhaps you are one of those blessed few who are exempt from such feelings. If so, thank God for it, and pray for those of us who are less gifted in that area.

What do the rest of us do about it? Do we continue to NURSE anger, to CHERISH resentment, as Sirach puts it, two powerful words which indicate an enjoyment of these evil feelings. We mustn’t. We need to be honest about their existence, and we must bring them before God, opening them up to His healing and forgiving mercy. We need to recognise how destructive they are of our own peace of mind, and how they insult the God who bore insults, humiliation, suffering, and an agonising death for our sakes, an agony deepened by that very bitterness of yours and mine.

Perhaps too we need to move from abstractions such as “society” and think rather in terms of individual human beings of flesh and blood with their own problems, their own hurts, their own share in our nature as children of God, brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, redeemed by His precious blood.

I am working on it. Please work on it with me, asking the Lord to transform us, to give us His Spirit of forgiveness, to remove from us these foul things.

23rd Sunday

23 rd Sunday 2020

Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

Many many moons ago, a few years after I had left the Diocesan Youth Centre at Castlerigg, I returned as a chaplain accompanying a school group. The school in question shall be nameless: it WASN’T Our Lady’s, Lancaster.

With the group was a youth worker, who made something of a clot of himself at one stage, in a way which was not helpful to the young people. The priest director of the centre and I discussed the matter, and agreed that it needed to be addressed at the end-of-course evaluation. It was also agreed that it should be I who raised the point, so that the criticism came from within the school, rather than from Castlerigg, the outside agency.

Come the Friday morning, came the evaluation, and I delivered what I considered to be an honest, fair, and firm critique of what had occurred. No one was left in any doubt that the event had been unacceptable.

Afterwards, the director said to me, “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” To my shame, I had to confess that I had. To rip someone apart, calmly but thoroughly, had been strangely satisfying, especially for someone like me, who am normally hopeless at delivering criticism.

At one level, it was a job well done: at another level, it was not good at all. Something needed to be said, but it should probably have been said to the individual first. I now feel too that the saying of it should have cost me something in the way of painful sympathy, rather than be a source of satisfaction. There was something amiss in what might be described as my fraternal correction.

There are times, as both Ezekiel and Our Lord make clear, when correction and criticism are needed. This, however, should be done to benefit the person being corrected, not to vent the spleen or satisfy the anger of the one doing the correcting. Those of us of a certain vintage will be familiar with the figure of the bullying schoolmaster, a figure which needs to be consigned to history, not imitated.

St. Paul sets out the criterion for fraternal or sororial (brotherly or sisterly) correction by effectively summarising Jesus’ own analysis of the commandments. Paul, in the footsteps of his Master, states in today’s extract from the Letter to the Romans that “love...is the answer to every one of the commandments.” Unfortunately, Paul, like most of us, did not always live up to his ideals: in his Letter to the Galatians, he brags of having humiliated Peter in front of everyone, in direct contradiction of the approach which Our Lord establishes in the Gospel.

Bizarrely, we can persuade ourselves that our very cruelty is based on love, something of which the Church has at times been guilty. The Inquisitors, who tortured and burned heretics, claimed to be acting out of love and a desire to save their victims’ souls; and many religious sisters and diocesan priests can recount horror stories of their treatment at the hands of sadistic superiors and tyrannical parish priests, who considered it their duty to break the spirit of those over whom they were given authority. This took place during what is sometimes viewed, through rose-tinted glasses, as a golden age of the Church when seminaries and religious houses were bursting at the seams.

All of us, at times, need to offer and accept correction. To do so in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of brotherly and sisterly love, is paramount, but it is not always easy to achieve. Too readily, our baser nature takes over, something which we must guard against by growing daily deeper in a genuine, self-surrendering love of God.

22nd Sunday

22nd Sunday 2020

Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16: 21-27

OUCH! Where did that come from? Talk about thunder in a blue sky! Poor Peter—we know that he normally puts his foot in things, gets them wrong, but for once he has got it right. He has made a profession of faith on behalf of the whole Church—“you are the Christ, the Son of the living God”—and has been pronounced blessed for doing so. Even more than that, he has been named Peter, the rock on which the Church is to be built, and has been entrusted with the keys of the Kingdom, and the power of binding and loosing. Peter is riding high.

Then suddenly he is brought back down to earth, not so much with a bump as with a resounding crash—and all because he was doing his best, trying to live up to the responsibilities he had been given. Life can be cruel at times, not least when one is trying to follow the Master.

It is easy to imagine Peter’s pride in his work, and his bafflement when, instead of being commended, he is given the sharpest of reprimands. He has been appointed leader of the Church, and he seizes the first opportunity to exercise that leadership. The Lord whom he loves, and who has given him this responsibility, starts to talk about suffering, and about being put to death.

This is Peter’s chance to show what an excellent leader he will be. He goes about it exactly the right way. He doesn’t raise the issue in public, but takes the Lord aside and speaks to Him confidentially. “Don’t worry about that Lord. You’ve got ME now. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Have you ever been commended for something, and set out straight away to prove how merited it was, only to discover that you have fallen flat on your face? that your initiative, which you genuinely thought would bring you plaudits, lands you instead with a kick up the backside? That is how Peter must have felt.

Instead of being grateful, Jesus snaps at Peter “Get behind me, Satan.” What a shattering blow that must have been to his self-esteem.

Why does Our Lord respond so vehemently, and what does His reprimand mean? Remember that Satan was, first of all, the Tempter. So he appears as the serpent in Eden, so he is in the Book of Job, tempting Job to curse God. Thus had Jesus encountered him in the wilderness as He prepared for His public ministry, and thus He encounters him now as Satan uses the voice and the good will of Peter to tempt Our Lord again.

If you have ever faced an unpleasant task, something which you know that you have to do but would prefer to avoid, how do you react if someone close to you says “No, you really don’t have to do it”? Isn’t there a massive temptation to grasp at that advice, to adopt it, even though, deep down, you know it to be wrong?

So it was for Jesus when his good friend and trusted lieutenant offered Him a route away from the suffering that lay ahead. In Mark’s account of the incident, Jesus is described as “turning, and seeing His disciples”. It is almost as if He is turning at bay, almost overwhelmed by the temptation, His resolution renewed and restored only by the sight of His other followers. Thus He was enabled to recognise the cunning of the Tempter in using the good will of His friend, and to call the Tempter by name in what was actually a repudiation of Satan rather than a rebuke to Peter, whom Satan was using.

We are, though, faced with a question: what price papal infallibility? To answer that question we have to consider the meaning and limits of infallibility. The First Vatican Council decreed in 1870 that the Pope teaches infallibly when, in consultation with the bishops, he makes an ex cathedra pronouncement on faith or morals. In the one hundred and fifty years since the decree was promulgated, it has been invoked only once, in the definition of the Assumption of Our Lady. Allegedly, Pope St. John Paul II wished to have Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae retrospectively declared infallible, only for his doctrinal watchdog, the future Pope Benedict XVI, to inform him that he did not have the authority to do so.

In Peter’s case, we can say that he spoke infallibly when it was “not flesh and blood which revealed [the truth] to him, but the Father in heaven.” When he spoke on his own initiative, he was not infallible, a truth which all his successors must remember.

21st Sunday

21st  Sunday 2020

Isaiah 22:19-23; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

I suppose that the day may come when keys are obsolete, when a refined version of the plastic card with which you now struggle to open a hotel (or, perhaps more probably, a Travelodge) door will replace them entirely. Even today, keys may perform a ceremonial, rather than a practical, purpose.

When the Duke of Lancaster, better known as Queen Elizabeth II, visits her castle in the city, she is presented with a huge (I think, silver) key, with which she doesn’t open the door. The same key is proffered to the Constable of the castle when he or she takes office. I doubt if it has ever been used for the purpose for which it is ostensibly intended. The Queen is the owner of the castle, the Constable is its steward: for both, the key symbolises their role.

The symbolic nature of keys has long been recognised. Thus, in the time of the Prophet Isaiah, the new “master of the palace”, the major domo as we might call him, or even the constable of the castle, is invested with the robe and sash of office, and also presented with a key, which is placed on his shoulder, just as a new knight of the realm is tapped on his shoulder with a sword today.

Furthermore, this is the Key of the House of David, a title which gives even greater authority as it allows the new steward a role in the guidance of the ruler of the land. Hence, “Key of David” is one of the titles applied to Jesus, signifying His supreme authority over the House of Judah, but ultimately over the world.

Thus, when that same Jesus gives to Simon Bar-jonah not only the new name of Peter, but also the metaphorical “keys of the Kingdom”, those present would have recognised the symbolism. Peter is given authority as Jesus’ representative to be “master of the palace”, steward or doorkeeper of the Kingdom of Heaven.

That this authority is to be exercised on earth, with effects in heaven, has at times over the centuries led to an exaggeration of the pope’s role. Although Jesus states that the keys are of “the Kingdom of Heaven” and their number is not specified, there have been times in the Church’s history when the symbol of the cross keys has been taken literally as meaning that there are two keys, one conferring spiritual and the other temporal authority.

This has led to many popes acting as earthly monarchs, and culminated in the establishment of the Papal States. When these were lost in the struggle for the unification of Italy, Pope Pius IX effectively went into a sulk, living thereafter as “the prisoner of the Vatican”. It was not until almost a century later that Pope St. John XXIII ventured into the rest of Italy, making a pilgrimage to Loreto, a process taken much further by his successor Pope St. Paul VI, who travelled not only beyond Rome, but also beyond Europe, establishing a precedent for papal journeys which are now seen as an integral part of the Pontiff’s role.

Peter’s successors now take for granted that their power is spiritual. By exercising that power wisely and humbly, they do influence worldly affairs. “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin is alleged to have asked scornfully. The system which he enforced is now in ruins, whilst the Church continues. Papal documents such as John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris”, Paul VI’s “Populorum Progressio” , and Francis’s “Laudato Si” have weighed heavily with governments, whilst St. John Paul II’s role in the fall of communism cannot be overstated.

There will always be dissenters. In Paul VI’s time, Archbishop Lefebvre led his followers into schism: at present, it seems not impossible that Cardinal Burke will do the same. Horror stories are emerging from the USA, rumours of seminaries declaring themselves “Francis-free zones”, and of parish priests preaching in support of the dubiously sane Archbishop Vigano. Yet if the gates of Hell cannot hold out against the Church, founded on the rock of Peter’s confession of faith, we can be sure that a loud but small minority of American fanatics and their poisonous publications will not do so.

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.

1

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.