19th Sunday Year B

19th Sunday 2021

1Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6: 41-51

“Those who come to me will never be hungry. Those who believe in me will never thirst.” That is how last Sunday’s Gospel ended, with the emphasis on coming to Jesus and believing in Him.

The Lectionary then omits five verses, before resuming with the complaints of Our Lord’s opponents about His words. As so often, they throw His origins at Him: they know His family, so how can He give Himself airs by claiming to come from God?

Once again, Jesus proceeds to stress “coming” and “believing”: these are the first conditions for benefiting from the Bread of Life. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me...to hear the teaching of the Father and to learn from it is to come to me.....everybody who believes has eternal life.” Coming and believing are at the heart of this discourse.

Then, Our Lord moves His teaching forward, as He speaks specifically about eating, and compares the manna which apparently came down from heaven with the bread which has truly come down from heaven. Using once again an “I am” saying, which identifies Him with the God of the burning bush, He speaks of Himself as the living bread, before spelling out the reality of the bread and of our eating: “the bread which I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world”.

Here it is evident that Our Lord is looking forward to the Last Supper, when He will pronounce over the ritual bread “This is my body” and is making the reality of the change of substance of that bread abundantly clear. This is to be, not a metaphorical eating, but an eating in fact, and an eating, not of bread, but of Jesus Himself.

A little over thirty years ago, when I was chaplain, in Preston, to what was then Lancashire Polytechnic, one of the Catholic students handed me, with understandable disgust, a pamphlet which he had found, composed by a somewhat extreme Ulster Protestant, to help people “convert” Catholics. This pamphlet stated “It is very difficult to convert Catholics because they take John 6 literally, and believe that it relates to the Eucharist”.

In all honesty, it would take a supreme act of wilful blindness not to believe that the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel relates to the Eucharist, but this pamphleteer would have none of it, pointing out triumphantly that John doesn’t mention the Eucharist in his account of the Last Supper. Eh? What is that supposed to prove? That John didn’t believe that Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper? That he is somehow denying that Jesus said “This is my body” and “This is my blood”?

The point is precisely that John didn’t need to describe the Eucharistic action at the Last Supper, because he had already set out its meaning in chapter six. As on other occasions, John takes for granted the account of events set out in the other Gospels, whilst he himself describes their deeper meaning. For instance, he doesn’t describe the Nativity, leaving that to Matthew and Luke, while he himself explores its deeper significance: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...the Word became flesh.”

To deny that John 6 refers to the Eucharist is the equivalent of claiming that his prologue bears no relation to the Nativity. And in order to reassure myself that this pamphlet does not represent a typical Protestant understanding of the Eucharist, I returned to CK Barrett’s Commentary on John. The late Professor Charles Kingsley Barrett is internationally recognised as one of the leading experts on St. John’s Gospel: he was also a Methodist minister, and he has no doubt that this chapter is Eucharistic in its intent.

We are to come to Jesus, and to believe, and then we are to eat and drink, receiving His flesh and blood. Next week, our understanding will be taken further.

18th Sunday Year B

Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 17:20-24; John 6:24-35

I am going to cheat today. I will get to the Gospel, the Bread of Life discourse, eventually, but first I want to head off at a tangent.

Today is the forty fifth anniversary of my first Mass. Actually, what we refer to as a priest’s first Mass is really his second, as he is ordained early enough to concelebrate the ordination Mass—but we won’t split hairs. I had invited my former university chaplain to preach, and he had worked out that today’s Second Reading had been the Epistle, almost eight years before, when I attended Sunday Mass for the first time at Fisher House, the chaplaincy, in the days before the Lectionary had been revised, and the new Lectionary introduced.

He had realised this because of one phrase, namely “a spiritual revolution”. It resonated because that earlier Mass had been celebrated in the autumn of 1968, the year of student revolution throughout Europe, and also in the United States, where protests against the Vietnam War were violently suppressed. “Revolution” was a key word in the student vocabulary, and the visiting preacher on that 1968 Sunday had taken “a spiritual revolution” as his theme.

Does that phrase still resonate today? It probably should, as we are constantly called, both as individuals and as the Church, to be turned upside down by the power of the Holy Spirit. We may feel that we have had our spiritual revolution, that we have answered our vocation, and that we are now entitled to sail peacefully along, resting on our supposed achievements; yet, deep down, we know that this isn’t sufficient.

God’s call is new every day. As God’s people, we are not entitled to take our ease, to settle for the comfortable life. Every day, we must allow the Spirit to disturb us, to shake us out of complacency, to lead us further and more deeply along our pilgrim way. Pope Francis has spent the last eight years doing that for the Church, and we must be prepared to have the same thing happen daily within ourselves.

In this respect, we do find a link with today’s First Reading and Gospel. The people of Israel are our predecessors, on a journey to the Promised Land. Like us, they are called to a spiritual revolution, to have their relationship with God constantly renewed; and, like us, they are reluctant and prone to grumble—and don’t forget that grumbling is one of the most destructive of activities.

It is in response to their grumbling that God gives them the manna, this mysterious “bread from heaven” which will sustain them along the pilgrim way, and which is the forerunner of the true bread from heaven, Christ the Lord, who sustains us by the gift of Himself, principally under the appearances of bread and wine in the Eucharist.

Jesus has already shown Himself to be the fulfilment of the prophets, multiplying loaves like Elisha, and as the new Moses, ascending the mountain and, later, crossing the waters of the lake, as Moses led the people through the sea. Now, He effectively announces Himself as God, the giver of bread, as He claims “I am the Bread of Life”, one of the “I am” sayings with which He identifies Himself with the God of the burning bush, who declared Himself to Moses as “I am, who am”, the One who is pure existence.

Over the next weeks, we shall encounter the development of the Bread of Life theme, but today there is one more crucial point to notice. Jesus doesn’t yet refer to eating and drinking: He speaks first of “coming” and “believing”. “Those who come to me will never be hungry. Those who believe in me will never thirst.” Our reception of the Bread of Life will be of no benefit unless we come with our whole heart, mind, and soul to Him, and believe in Him—unless we constantly undergo our spiritual revolution.

17th Sunday year B

17th Sunday 2021

2 Kings 4: 42-44; Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6: 1-15

Year B is the Year of Mark in the Lectionary, but because Mark’s is a relatively short Gospel, we spend five weeks in the summer reading chapter six of St. John’s Gospel, the Bread of Life (or Eucharistic) Discourse. We begin today with the feeding of the five thousand, preceded by the account of Elisha’s similar multiplication of loaves, which look forward to the still more miraculous feeding of God’s people with the Body and Blood of the Redeemer.

There will be much to say about this in the weeks ahead, so today I would like to take the opportunity of focusing again on the often neglected Second Reading.

Today’s extract from Paul’s Letter to the Church at Ephesus begins “I, the prisoner in the Lord”. What does Paul mean by this?

I suspect that there are two meanings. Firstly Paul has, as he says elsewhere, been captured by Christ. He belongs to Christ as His servant, His prisoner, His friend. Like the prophets of old who found that, if they attempted to refrain from prophesying, there was a fire burning within them which obliged them to fulfil their calling, so Paul finds that he cannot avoid proclaiming the Gospel.

Secondly, he is, or will be, literally a prisoner, seized by his fellow Jews and handed over to the Romans. As a prisoner, he will be conveyed from place to place until he meets a martyr’s death in Rome.

What then of us? Have we been captured by Christ? Do we fully belong to Him as His servants, His prisoners, His friends? Does our life speak of Christ? Is it a prophecy of the Kingdom?

And to what extent are we prisoners in a negative sense? Are you or I held captive by our emotions, our desires, our habits or addictions, even our routines because “we have always done it this way”, or at the other extreme, by our restlessness and desire for change? Are there any ways in which we are kept away from Christ because we are prisoners?

“I implore you to lead a life worthy of your vocation.” Again, I sense a double meaning. On the one hand, there is our major vocation to a particular state in life, whether it be religious consecration, priesthood, marriage, motherhood or fatherhood, single life, widowhood or whatever. Then there is our daily response to God’s call: how am I living out my relationship with God today?

What sort of life is worthy of your vocation? At one time, that seemed deceptively simple. You prayed, you kept the rules, you avoided scandal, you followed the lines. More recently, the answer has become less obvious. It is rarely enough simply to follow the rules, to avoid rocking the boat, or upsetting the apple cart. If that is all that we are doing, we need to be alert to the danger of Pharisaism, of making the rules an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end.

Sometimes, Christ calls us to strike out in unexpected directions, as He Himself did: to “take the road less travelled” as my spiritual director puts it. I remember hearing a certain saint, once regarded as a role model, but now less popular for those very same reasons, described as a “model novice”, to which the obvious response is “What use is a model novice? We need one of flesh and blood.” It is not a matter of innovation for its own sake, but of allowing the Lord to lead us, at times, in unexpected ways, along rocky and less familiar paths, always with the help of wise guides and a life of deep prayer.

Paul goes on to speak of charity, selflessness, gentleness, and patience, and particularly of that unity which is the work of the Spirit. The Evil One seeks to sow disunity, and it is of this that Pope Francis has been particularly conscious in his restoring the limits on the use of the Tridentine rite of Mass.

When Pope Benedict XVI extended the facility to use this rite, which he labelled the Extraordinary Form, his principal wish was to foster unity. He himself was appalled to discover that, in some cases, the result was the opposite. There were many people, devoted to the Extraordinary Form, for whom it became a means of fulfilling Pope Benedict’s wishes: sadly, there have been others who used it as a weapon, a mark of superiority, and have taken it as an opportunity to reject the vernacular liturgy altogether, along with the authority of the most recent General Council of the Church. It is for the sins of the latter that the former may feel that they are being penalised.

So, are you and I living lives worthy of our various vocations? To seek an answer to that question, we must look at the depth of our prayer lives, and of our love for our neighbour, especially the neighbour who is called to unity with us in the one Body and the one Spirit.

16th Sunday Year B

16th Sunday 2021

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

When I still had roots in the parish in which I grew up, I would sometimes, when I was home, celebrate Mass in the parish primary school, where I noticed that they used a book of selected readings and prayers for various occasions and “themes”. Once, I offered Mass for the end of the school year: for this the book in question provided a truncated version of today’s Gospel, ending with the words “You must come away to some lonely place and rest for a while”.

I couldn’t help feeling that this played fast and loose with the meaning of Scripture, changing the whole import of Our Lord’s words, or at least of the context in which they were set. The implication was that the children and staff should enjoy a relaxing holiday, an admirable aspiration, but the complete opposite of what occurred in the Gospel.

The whole point of today’s Gospel is that Jesus and the disciples were thwarted in their quest for relaxation, as the people followed them, and He responded to their needs. He was the Good Shepherd all the time, even when officially “off duty”, and the combination of this passage with Jeremiah’s denunciation of the neglectful shepherds, points the way for any of us who have pastoral responsibility of any sort.

Who falls into that category? I would suggest that it includes priests, religious, members of the caring professions, parents, grandparents, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. How often do you read of an off duty police officer or paramedic intervening in an emergency? When is the mother or father of a child ever off duty? What parent has not arisen several times in the night to attend to the needs of their children? What son or daughter of an elderly parent has not done the same?

There is always a slight tinge of dismay when the priest is awakened in the night by the shrilling of the phone, because it will almost certainly lead to a journey to the hospital or to the bedside of a dying parishioner, but there will also be gratitude that people still consider it important to send for the priest. And no mother or father seriously begrudges having to leave their bed to attend to the needs of their child.

For those who no longer have those responsibilities, or for whom it does not form part of their vocation, there is still an unceasing concern for the Church, the world, and creation. You are not called to permanent anxiety, but if all that you do is given to God, then you too will be exercising that pastoral concern which is wide enough and generous enough to embrace the whole world.

Whether as a religious, or as a lay person in the world, you may not always be conscious of that smell of the sheep with which the Holy Father has called us to live, but if you are living authentically in your own sphere of life, then through God’s grace the sheep will be benefitting.

So, are we never to relax, never to make holiday, never to indulge in pleasant activities? Far from it, for without such things we shall become stale, and our concern for the world will be something which we resent, or which we offer grudgingly. If we are constantly giving, with no heed for our own needs, our well will run dry, and we shall have nothing to offer.

GK Chesterton’s friend and fellow writer Hilaire Belloc penned the following lines:

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,

There’s always laughter and good red wine.

At least, I’ve always found it so.

Benedicamus Domino.”

But, while we are enjoying them, we must be prepared to put them aside, as Our Lord did, should the need arise.

15th Sunday Year B

15th Sunday 2021

Amos 7:12-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

By and large, the Second Reading at Mass tends to receive short shrift. The reason for this is obvious: we tend to focus on the Gospel, as being the most important reading, and the Old Testament reading, being chosen to link in with the Gospel, often features in the homily too. The Second Reading, by contrast, is something of a sore thumb. During Ordinary Time, it simply follows a New Testament Epistle week by week, with no particular relationship with the other readings, and so it finds itself something of an orphan.

Perhaps we can redress the balance a little this week by focusing on the Second Reading, which today takes the form of the first of seven weekly extracts from the Letter of St. Paul to the Church at Ephesus, a large seaport on the coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Paul was the founder of that Church, and some scholars suggest tht the absence of a more intimate, personal tone may indicate that the letter was written, not by Paul himself, but by one of his followers, but that need not concern us here.

I would like to draw attention to some of the words and phrases of this extract, all of which emphasise God’s choice of us, and His love for us, a choice which He has made from all eternity.

The writer begins by underlining our blessedness: “who has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.” We are blessed as a people, as members of the Church. Do you think of yourself as blessed, as having received gifts from God, especially spiritual gifts, which draw you closer to Him, and which you can use for the benefit of others?

“Before the world was made, He chose us, chose us in Christ.” God has chosen you from all eternity, has loved you with an everlasting love, has made you unique, infinitely precious to Him. Are you aware of being infinitely loved by God, uniquely precious in His sight?

“To be holy and spotless.” This is the root of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. By preserving Mary from all sin from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb, God ensured that His intention should be fulfilled, His intention of creating a people holy and spotless. Mary already is what we are called and destined to be.

“And to live through love in His presence.” That is our ultimate aim, but we are already practising it. We are always in the presence of God. Are we always living through love?

“His adopted sons and daughters.” Jesus the Christ is the Son of God by nature: God’s intention is that we should share that same status by adoption. How often do you consider the immense love of God, who loves us with the same intensity, the Holy Spirit, with which He loves the only begotten Son?

“To make us praise the glory of His grace.” Our prayers, such as the Glory be to the Father... and the Gloria at Mass are expressions of praise. Do we always use those prayers in a genuine spirit of praise and thanksgiving?

“His free gift to us in the Beloved.” Grace is, by definition, free. We do not need to earn God’s love or God’s grace. He gives it to us freely and liberally.

“Through His blood, we gain our freedom.” That word “freedom” will recur towards the end of the reading. Do you find faith and life in Christ liberating or constricting? If the latter, there may be a need to re-examine some elements of your faith, and your life among God’s people.

“Claimed as God’s own.” The Royal Lancaster Regiment, now incorporated into the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, was known as the King’s Own, giving it a special relationship with the Crown. We, as God’s own, have a special relationship with God, in our belonging to Him.

“Stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit.” This was done at our baptism, and at our confirmation, where the formula is now “Be sealed with the Holy Spirit”. (And woe betide you, in the days of Bishop Brewer, if you did not respond “Amen”.) A seal is a mark of ownership: we are owned by God.

Choice, seal, freedom, adoption as sons and daughters: the whole tenor of this passage is one of encouragement. We are loved and chosen from all eternity: that should give us the confidence to live in loving service.

14th Sunday Year B

14th Sunday 2021

Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2Cor 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

Many many moons ago, from the beginning of Advent 1982, until Holy Week 1983, I had a brief and inglorious career with the Catholic Missionary Society, conducting parish missions in various parts of England. A mission included eight hours a day of door knocking, ringing the doorbells of people whose addresses appeared on the parish census lists. It never took long in any parish to realise that these lists were hopelessly out of date, many people having moved or died, whilst many of those who were found were at best indifferent, at worst hostile.

Some priests revelled in the work. One of our number, a cheerful Irishman, on approaching a block of flats, would press all the buttons at once to see who might be unearthed. I, on the other hand, tended to press the bell very gently, count ten, and then high tail it away as fast as my legs would carry me.

To me, knocking on the doors of fifty total strangers a day was the nearest thing to hell that I could imagine. Indeed, one night, dreaming that I was to spend eternity doing parish missions, I woke myself up with a cry of dismay.

I mention this because, in the course of one mission, one of my colleagues found himself pondering Our Lord’s words from today’s Gospel: “He was amazed at their lack of faith”. I, meanwhile, had that question of Jesus’ constantly running through my head: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?”

If that was the situation almost forty years ago, how much more difficult must it be today? Is Jesus still amazed at people’s lack of faith, and what can be done about it?

In all honesty, we need to admit that the Church hasn’t always done the cause of the Kingdom, and of Jesus, a lot of favours. The clergy sexual abuse scandal has caused, and continues to cause, an immense amount of harm. Then, in addition to these ghastly crimes which men knew that they were committing, there are the equally destructive horrors perpetrated by people who genuinely believed that they were doing God’s will, in the residential schools in Ireland and Canada and, we shall probably also learn, in the USA. Small wonder if people are saying “Well, if that’s the face of Christ, then He’s an ugly so-and-so, and I really don’t want to know Him”.

These dreadful events have, in recent years, overshadowed the good which the Church has done over the centuries, and continues to do, in the fields of health care, education, development, the feeding of the hungry, and the defence of the oppressed and the marginalised. It is very easy, but wrong, to conclude that the Church always does more harm than good, especially when a writer such as Hilary Mantel can make a great deal of money—and be given a damehood—by deliberately distorting history by making St. Thomas More into a torturer, and the torturer Thomas Cromwell into a hero chiefly, as she admits herself, to express her hatred of, and to damage the reputation of, the Church of her birth.

So, will Jesus still be amazed at people’s lack of faith, and, when He comes again, will He find any faith on earth? Perhaps more to the immediate point, what can be done to reawaken faith? There is constant talk of evangelisation, but nobody seems willing, or able, to explain what it means. There was even a Decade of Evangelisation, which went down like the proverbial lead balloon. So what is to be done?

Perhaps we need to pay more heed to St. Paul’s words, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, as he ponders his own shortcomings, weaknesses, struggles and failures, and concludes “It is when I am weak that I am strong”. We must remember also, again with St. Paul, that we are preaching a crucified Christ who will always be, to many, a folly and a stumbling block.

In other words, we must be a humble Church, deeply rooted in Christ, and showing to the world the true face of Christ. There must be no trace of arrogance or superiority, and we need to recall the words of Pope St. Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi”: “The modern world listens to witnesses rather than to teachers, and if it listens to teachers, it is because they are also witnesses”. Let us remember too that it is when we are weak that we are strong, and that success and failure are not always what they seem.

13th Sunday Year B

13th Sunday 2021

Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; 2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15; Mark 5:21-43

I am going to tell you a story. It is about an Englishman, an Irishman, an Italian, and a Belgian, and the setting is the Grotto at Lourdes, a little over fifty years ago.

One afternoon, as a brancardier (literally, a stretcher bearer, but in reality, a general helper of the sick) I was on duty at the Grotto. Among the crowds was a young Italian woman on a stretcher, who was anxious to attract my attention. Not knowing any Italian, I called a bilingual Italian colleague, who ascertained that the young woman wanted to be taken through the Grotto, the scene of Our Lady’s apparitions.

Enlisting the help of a young Belgian soldier, and of an Irishman who was higher in the ranks of brancardiers, we wheeled the stretcher to the entrance to the Grotto, where we encountered an obstacle in the form of an official who, like the angel with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, was barring the way. Apparently it wasn’t the done thing for a stretcher to be taken through the Grotto.

“Pas possible! Pas possible!” exclaimed this individual. The Irishman took charge. “Si, c’est possible!” he insisted—and please don’t tell me that he should have said “oui”, because I remember from O-level French that “yes”, when uttered as a contradiction, is “si”. Thereupon he moved away the barrier at the entrance, and the four of us, the Irishman, the Italian, the Belgian, and I, lifted the stretcher from its trolley, and carried it through the Grotto, the queuing pilgrims happily making way for us.

The young Italian woman reached out and touched the rock, and laughed and cried by turns. We replaced her stretcher on its trolley and went our separate ways.

Now, I suspect that there will be sophisticated people in the ranks of Holy Mother Church who will disapprove of that story. They will consider that processing through the Lourdes Grotto and touching the rock is mere superstition, unworthy of thinking Christians. I knew a woman, high in the ranks of Catholic educationalists, who boasted that she had never been to Lourdes, and that, driving past the end of the road leading to the shrine at Knock, she had carried on driving.

My mother would not have agreed with her; nor would Pope Francis; nor would St. John Henry Newman; nor would Jesus. When I brought home a rose leaf from Assisi, my mother assiduously applied it to her arthritic knee. Pope Francis, a thoroughly cultured Jesuit, has spoken repeatedly in favour of popular devotions. St. John Henry Newman, one of the greatest intellectual figures of the nineteenth century English speaking world, delivered a sermon in praise of the simple faith of the woman with a haemorrhage in today’s Gospel, who wanted to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, and Our Lord Himself blessed the Father for hiding the mysteries of the Kingdom from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.

Furthermore, when Jesus encountered the woman with the haemorrhage, He didn’t call her superstitious. He didn’t tell her to sort out her theological understanding. He said “Your faith has restored you to health. Go in peace, and be free of your complaint.”

Notice something else: the woman’s cure was as automatic as she believed it would be. Jesus didn’t actively cure her: it happened as a response to her faith. The woman was cured before Jesus was aware of it: St. Mark says that the Lord was aware that “power had gone out from Him”. It was a direct result of what the sophisticated would regard as the woman’s superstitious gesture.

Even Jesus Himself was effectively accused of superstition. He was laughed at, but He persisted in taking the hand of the dead girl and telling her to get up. Yet the simple faith of Jairus, the girl’s father, was sufficient, and Jesus was practical enough to remind the bystanders to feed her.

We have a responsibility to develop our understanding of the things of God, and to learn. God has given us an intellect to be developed, and we should use it in God’s service—but, as we gain a deeper intellectual understanding of our faith, let us never despise or lose the simplicity of the faith of the little ones to whom the Father has revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom.

12th Sunday Year B

12th Sunday v2 2021

Job 38:1, 8-11; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41

“For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation”. I always associate that phrase “a new creation”, not only with St. Paul, but also with the late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, the famous Dominican writer and theologian, who suffered at the hands of the religious authorities in the late 1960s, but who emerged triumphant with both his faith and his sense of humour intact.

I was actually pondering whether

 it was that experience which focused his attention on the new creation, as his reinstatement may have felt like a new birth, and “The New Creation” was the title of a conference which he delivered at Fisher House, the Cambridge chaplaincy, in the spring of 1971, “conference” being Cambridge-speak for a long homily. Delving a little further, however, I discovered that his book entitled “The New Creation”, which I bought later on the basis of that conference, was written in 1963, long before these events, so that theory bites the dust. Never mind!

We do well to ask what the term means. Perhaps it has taken on a new dimension in the context of the green agenda promoted by Pope Benedict XVI, and developed by Pope Francis, notably in his encyclical Laudato si. We must look with new eyes on the created world: we must recognise it as gift, beautiful and fragile, for which we have responsibility.

It is that, but it is also much more than that. GK Chesterton’s explanation comes to mind, of why he became a Catholic. In his Autobiography, Chesterton wrote: “The first essential answer is...to get rid of my sins.” He went on to say that, when a Catholic emerges from Confession, “He may be grey and gouty, but he is only five minutes old”.

To become a new creation is to allow God to re-form us, re-fashion us, so that we see the world, and life, with new eyes. We no longer view our lives as “one damn thing after another” as someone expressed it, or as the same “damn thing” constantly recurring like a perpetual Groundhog Day, which may be one of the temptations of old age, as someone is obliged by physical limitations to accept a restricted routine. Rather, we recognise the presence of Christ in every situation, finding Him more fully both in His silent presence in our own depths, and in the people and situations which we encounter. “Christ plays in ten thousand places” wrote the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His”, whilst William Blake encouraged us “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”.

Nor is it only creation that we view with different eyes: it is also Christ Himself. “Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh” says St. Paul, “that is not how we know Him now”. This was an experience through which the Twelve and all the disciples had to pass.

Despite all that Our Lord had done, and all that He had taught, the disciples struggling to make headway in the boat still saw Him very much in the flesh; they still could not comprehend His true nature. Of course it is important to recognise the full humanity of Jesus, and His total identification with us, but to be “in Christ”, we need to recognise the divinity too.

“Who can this be?” ask the tempest-tossed disciples. Not until His resurrection and ascension, and His gift of the Holy Spirit, would they have an answer to that question, would they become fully a new creation. It is a question that we too must answer. We can easily quote Peter’s response, inspired by the Father and delivered at Caesarea Philippi, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” but, until we make that answer our own, by opening our lives to the Trinity who long to dwell within us, we will fall short of our vocation to be a new creation.

11th Sunday Year B

11th Sunday in Ordinary time 2021

Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

Where are we up to in our sowing and reaping? Or, to put it more accurately, where and how is God working to build the Kingdom? (Because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is God’s work, not ours. We are, as St. Paul commented, co-workers with God, but when we forget that, and attempt to do the job ourselves, the results are disastrous.)

When I was a child, in the 1950s, I don’t think that those questions would have been asked. People rarely spoke about the Kingdom: they spoke about the Church, and effectively identified the Church with the Kingdom. I learnt in Primary School about the Church Militant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Triumphant: the Church Militant was extremely militant, and was seen as being well on its way to becoming the Church Triumphant.

These were the latter days of Pope Pius XII, an ascetic and almost Messianic figure, invariably clothed in white, his trademark gesture a spreading of his arms like those of the crucified Christ. As the Church in this country grew in numbers and confidence, we would often bellow, in churches packed to the doors for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Cardinal Wiseman’s triumphalist hymn “Full in the panting heart of Rome”, with its chorus, rising to a crescendo: “God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope, GOD BLESS OUR POPE, the great, the good”.

Little did we or our elders suspect that, behind the splendid facade, lurked a great mess of rottenness. Scandals continue to come to light which show that sexual abuse by clergy, far from being a result of the alleged indiscipline of the 70s (pace Pope Benedict XVI) was very much alive in the 50s and before. Meanwhile, other scandals are unearthed. Hard on the heels of the revelations of cruelty and forced adoptions in mother and baby homes in Ireland, we learn of ill-treatment in Church-run residential schools for First Nation (formerly called “Indian”) children in Canada, covering the first half of the twentieth century.

Pius XII himself has suffered massive blows to his reputation. His response to news of the treatment of Jews in occupied Europe continues to divide opinion. There is no doubt that the Vatican, along with many monasteries and convents, sheltered and saved the lives of countless Jews, or that the Pope had legitimate fears that speaking out more forcibly might prove counter-productive. Nonetheless, he was a man of his time and background, with that innate dislike and distrust of Jews typical of his era and social class. Even throughout the 50s, when Pius had reformed the Easter liturgy, we still prayed on Good Friday for “the perfidious Jews, that God may remove the veil from their minds”.

Why do I mention this, trawling, as it were, through relatively recent history? It is because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is indeed God’s work: it takes place silently and unseen. Far too easily, we fall into the trap of thinking that it is up to us to make the Kingdom grow; that we know when it is time to begin reaping.

We need a very hefty dose of humility. During that era of our confidence, we were, as often as not, reaping weeds. The danger now lies in our believing that we have learnt from our mistakes, and that, “This time, more than any other time, we’ll get it right”, as the 1982 England World Cup squad sang—and we know what happened there. Hence, in this country, there has been a plethora of programmes and assemblies: “A Time for Building”, “The Church 2,000”, “The National Pastoral Congress”, “Renew”, “New Start with Jesus”, “Fit for Mission”, and various others, all of which have come and gone, barely creating a ripple.

So what do we do now? Perhaps most importantly we remind ourselves that the growth of the Kingdom IS God’s work, and we set ourselves to seek a deeper union with Him, while, at the same time, “reading the signs of the times” as the Second Vatican Council suggested, though always aware that our reading ability is less than we imagined.

Corpus Christi

The Body and Blood of Christ 2021

Exodus 24:3-8; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26

There is no doubt that the Prime Minister’s wedding in Westminster Cathedral has set the proverbial cat among the equally proverbial pigeons. There has been a great deal of comment on social media, most of it highly critical of the Church’s perceived double standards.

Unfortunately for the Church, she is hoist upon the petard of Canon Law. Without Canon Law there would be anarchy, and one of the greatest problems with which the Church has currently to contend is that bishops ignore Canon Law in order to bully priests. Yet like all law, it throws up anomalies. Hence the PM has been able to exploit a loophole—because he was baptised a Catholic, his previous marriages, having taken place outside the Catholic Church, are technically invalid—and this has given rise to understandable accusations of injustice.

Some of the people who have commented have talked about reasons for leaving the Church. I was pondering, the other evening, the best way of responding to such people, when it struck me, like a bolt of lightning, that for me, at least, it all comes down to the Eucharist. Could I live without sharing sacramentally in the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Lord, Jesus Christ? Would life be truly meaningful to me if I could not receive the Body and Blood of that same Lord in Holy Communion? In the words of a hymn popular in my youth “Could I dare live unless to prove some love for such unmeasured love?”

My answer was a resounding “No!” Life for me would be a desert, a fruitless wasteland, without frequent participation in the Mass, culminating in receiving the living God within myself. I can only grieve for those people who may have been deprived of the Eucharist for months by the pandemic, for those in some parts of the world who are rarely able to receive Jesus in holy communion because of a lack of priests.

This feast which we keep today is an appropriate occasion for pondering this truth. It is the Feast of Corpus Christi—except, of course, that it isn’t. The Missal calls it “The Body and Blood of Christ”—then, in brackets, “Corpus Christi”, which any schoolboy, or indeed, any schoolgirl, a couple of generations ago, would have recognised as an appalling mistranslation. The Body and Blood of Christ is “Corpus ET SANGUIS Christi”, which is what the feast should really be called. What the Missal does is downright sloppy.

For centuries it didn’t greatly matter, because, for a huge chunk of the Church’s history, Communion, for lay people, meant receiving the Body of Christ, though we need always to remember that Christ is received whole and entire—body, blood, soul, and divinity—under either species, whether under the appearances of bread or of wine. Indeed, this feast grew in popularity at a time when people received communion infrequently, and the emphasis was upon adoration of Christ in the Sacred Host, rather than on actually receiving Him.

When the new Lectionary was implemented in 1969, we found ourselves, every three years, with today’s readings, where the emphasis is on the Blood of Christ, rather than on His Body. This is an important adjustment, correcting a neglect of the Blood of Christ, but it drew attention to an anomaly: that the people of God, with some exceptions such as seminarians and members of religious communities, were missing out on the full sign value of the sacrament by not drinking the Precious Blood. Indeed, it was to be another seventeen years before, in England and Wales, the chalice was offered to the laity.

Now because of the pandemic, we are back in the situation where lay people are prohibited from receiving “under both kinds”. I suspect that, when some sort of normality returns, people may still be reluctant to receive from the chalice, because of fear of infection. Of course you are receiving the whole Christ under one species, but how much more fulfilling to be able to obey Christ’s injunction “Take and drink, for this is my blood”.

Trinity

aTrinity Sunday 2021

Deut 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28: 16-20

If I were to ask you “Have you read Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lamda?” you would no doubt reply “Of course I have. I dip into it every day, but it has nothing to do with the Trinity: you might as well ask about Plato’s Demiurge, or his Theory of Forms.” In replying thus, you would, of course, be quite right.

The speculations of the great ancient philosophers have no direct bearing on our understanding of God. Nevertheless, they do show us how people have always struggled to form some concept of God, while at the same time demonstrating how difficult this is.

Those of you who were spared in your youth from grappling with the complexities of Plato and Aristotle may feel that you have much for which to be grateful. To fathom the mysterious analogies of Plato’s sun, divided line, and cave, is difficult enough in English: to have to face it in the original Greek is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat.

This week, it will be half a century since I sat my Finals paper on the theology of Plato and Aristotle, and a year more since I attempted to deconstruct the Theory of Forms, translating gobbets (where on earth does that term come from, I wonder?) and struggling to distinguish the deuteros plous from the protos plous, yet the very mention of such things still has the power to reduce me to a gibbering wreck.

Giants of the ancient world, these two philosophers were attempting to guide their contemporaries to a less crude understanding of reality than was provided by the pantheon of Olympian gods, constantly quarrelling among themselves, and frequently interfering in human affairs to suit their own ends. The result of their efforts was to discredit the notion of a multiplicity of personalised gods in favour of philosophical concepts lacking all human characteristics. (Plato’s Demiurge does have some elements of personality, but it is questionable how seriously the author took him.)

Thus, in Plato we are led to a more or less abstract concept of ideal goodness, whilst Aristotle gives us the Unmoved Mover, whose “thinking is a thinking of thinking”, a being represented by a perfect circle, totally self-absorbed, whose thoughts nonetheless move the universe.

Does any of this have anything to do with today’s feast? Well, both Plato and Aristotle have exercised a powerful influence on Christian thinkers through the ages. Both Platonists and Aristotelians have contributed to our understanding of God.

Like Plato, we see God as ideal goodness and infinite perfection: with Aristotle, we recognise that God is self-sufficient, needing nothing beyond Himself, not moved by, or dependent on, anything.

Where these mighty Greeks fall short is in failing to recognise relationship as an essential element in God’s nature. Plato’s Form of the Good is, to all intents and purposes, abstract: Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is a totally solitary being.

Christianity alone sees God as thoroughly involved in relationship, both in and beyond Himself. There is one God, but God’s very being is expressed in relationship, the Father eternally loving and begetting the Son, who eternally loves the Father, their love being so intense as to be a person, the Holy Spirit. Likewise, that love is so deep that it spills over into Creation, and into human beings as the pinnacle of that Creation.

There is a Christian symbol which carries echoes of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. God is sometimes represented by a circle with spokes and a hub. The hub is inscribed “Deus” (God) whilst at points on the perimeter are “Pater” (Father) “Filius” (Son) and “Spiritus Sanctus” (Holy Spirit). On the sections of the rim joining these three points is written three times “non est”. The Father is not the Son, and neither of them is the Holy Spirit, but from each of them is a spoke joining them to the hub (God) and inscribed “est”. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.

Relationship, community is the essence of God. As children of God, we must have it as our essence too: relationship, community, with God, and with one another.

Pentecost

Pentecost 2021

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

I think that you need the gift of tongues to be able to pronounce the various nations who heard the Pentecost proclamation: Medes, Elamites, Phrygians, Cappadocians, Cretans, and so on. I remember at the Diocesan Youth Centre a young man wading valiantly through all the names and being rewarded with a round of applause.

What is the gift of tongues? At Pentecost it was, it seems, a miraculous gift of spontaneous translation, by which the various language groups all heard the preaching of the apostles in their own native tongue. Elsewhere in the New Testament it appears to have a different meaning which I have never been able to fathom, but which has influenced the Charismatic Renewal.

The Charismatic movement has exerted considerable influence within the Church during the last half century or so, though I have to confess that it has never appealed to me. Exuberance is not generally part of my make up unless I am watching football or cricket, and my approach to worship is rather more staid. If I am expected to clap along to a hymn, my response tends to be to thrust my hands into the sleeves of my alb.

Consequently, I am relieved that the Pentecost liturgy always includes the Gospel of Easter Sunday evening, despite the confusion which this sometimes causes. I am more comfortable personally with the gentle Easter Sunday bestowal of the Holy Spirit than with its more spectacular Pentecost manifestation.

What happened on Easter Sunday evening? The risen Christ appeared to the frightened apostles in the Upper Room and breathed the Holy Spirit into them, giving them the power to forgive sins, and preparing them for their mission. Thus their fears were banished; they were made ready for more encounters with the risen Lord; and they were enabled to enter that period of intense prayer, in company with Our Lady, which had its fulfilment in the Pentecost event.

There is more than one way in which the Holy Spirit comes upon us and into us. The apostles encountered the Holy Spirit in these two profoundly different manifestations--in the gentle breathing of Easter, and in the powerful wind and flame of Pentecost—for two different purposes.

We too will receive the Spirit in different ways at different times. Indeed, we have already done so, or we would not be reading the Scriptures and attempting to explore their meaning. As St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “There is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit...The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose”.

It has sometimes been claimed, often with a degree of cynicism, that the Holy Spirit has been the forgotten member of the Holy Trinity. If there is truth in that statement it is largely because the Holy Spirit is difficult to envisage. We have pictorial minds, with which we can form a limited image of the Father (we know what a father looks like) and of the Son (we know what a son looks like, and we probably have a definite mental picture of THE SON) but the only physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit have been as a dove, a rushing wind, and tongues of flame: it is difficult to relate to a blast of wind.

I believe though that there is more fiction than reality in our alleged neglect of the Holy Spirit. We have always made the Sign of the Cross, invoking all three persons of the Trinity, and we have done the same in the “Glory be...”  Meetings and gatherings have always begun with the prayer to the Holy Spirit (“Come Holy Spirit...”) and in the Infants I learned to belt out all the verses of “Come Holy Ghost”, admittedly not always accurately:  “Thy sacred wing” became “thy Saint Credwing” and I heard “ne’er decays” as “Mary’s case” fixing in my mind a picture of Our Lady sitting on her suitcase, awaiting the arrival of the taxi which would take her to the station at the beginning of her holiday.

So the Holy Spirit has always been part of our life in Christ. Had that not been so, as St. Paul points out, we would have no such life. Whether spectacularly as at Pentecost, or gently as on Easter Sunday, the Spirit has come and does come to us. Let us pray today for a deeper awareness of the Spirit’s presence.

7th Sunday of Easter

7th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts: 1:15-17, 20-26; 1John 4:11-16; John 17:11-19

As you are probably aware, for the past fifteen years, the English bishops have been doing the hokey cokey with Holy Days.

You put the Ascension in

You take Epiphany out

In, out, you shake them all about.

(Yes, I know that the hokey cokey was originally a blasphemy against the Mass, but it fits perfectly the shenanigans over Holy Days during the past decade and a half, so I think we are entitled to “spoil the Egyptians” and use it where it is helpful.)

Currently, in England and Wales, the Ascension is back on the Thursday, forty days after Easter, and so today we have the readings for the 7th Sunday of Easter, which went missing for a few years.

These readings today should help us prepare our hearts and minds to be more receptive of the Holy Spirit. Of course the Holy Spirit is not limited to Pentecost, or to the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation. The Spirit is poured out on us every day, and is the driving force of all the sacraments, but it is a wise custom to pray more fervently for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit as we approach the Feast which saw such powerful manifestations of the Spirit.

At the same time, we must not forget that Pentecost was not the first occasion on which the Holy Spirit was given to the apostles. When the risen Christ appeared in the Upper Room on Easter Sunday evening, He breathed on the apostles and said “Receive the Holy Spirit”, giving them the power to forgive sins. That is why that Gospel is used at Pentecost, which can have the unfortunate effect of causing dozy preachers, who haven’t noticed that it refers to Easter Sunday, to claim that the apostles were still cowering in fear at Pentecost.

You and I know that such a notion is baloney. Luke makes clear, in his Ascension Day Gospel, that, after the Ascension, “they went back to Jerusalem full of joy, and were continually in the Temple praising God”. When they did meet in the Upper Room, it was to pray, in company with Our Lady, the Spirit filled woman, for a fresh gift of the Spirit.

Furthermore, today’s episode of the election of Matthias is set between the Ascension and Pentecost, and involves a positive, not a fear filled group. You may have noticed that there were “about a hundred and twenty persons in the congregation”: I very much doubt that these were all crammed into the Upper Room—had they been, I suspect that the floor would have given way.

The apostles at the time were in a fairly similar situation to that in which we find ourselves today, having already received the Holy Spirit, but awaiting a fresh outpouring, which would renew both them and us to proclaim the Gospel. As we continue to pray for a fuller gift of the Spirit, the First Letter of St. John reminds us of the command of mutual love, made possible by the Spirit and by God’s presence within us. As always, that letter is prompting us to examine our consciences: how fully am I living out that commandment of love?

Meanwhile, today’s Gospel is an extract from the High Priestly prayer of Jesus, part of the Farewell Discourses which St. John sets in the context of the Last Supper. In this prayer, Our Lord consecrates us to the Father, and prays especially that we may live in the truth: the words “true” or “truth” occur five times in today’s Gospel.

What does it mean, to be consecrated in the truth? Bear in mind that Jesus said ”I am the truth”, so to be consecrated in the truth is to live in Him. In other words, the truth is something alive, brought to life by the Spirit breathing into us. We find truth set out in the words of Scripture, and in the teachings of the Church, but words on a page can remain dead. They must be brought to life in us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and by our communion with Him who is the truth.

6th Sunday of Easter

6th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17

You may be familiar with the saying “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there”. I do, and I wasn’t, at least in the sense implied by that adage: namely, that if you were part of the 60s “scene”, you would have been too far gone on dope and acid to recall it.

I have to confess that the swinging 60s didn’t swing for me. It was the decade of Saturday morning school, O-levels, A-levels, Scholarship exams, and finally adjustment to the mysterious world of university in 1968, the year not only of student revolution, but also of Humanae Vitae and its tumultuous aftermath. I shall always be grateful that I had football refereeing to keep me relatively sane.

In the “Summer of Love” I didn’t go to San Francisco with flowers in my hair—though some of you may well have done so. I went to the Co-op Furnishing Dept. to earn some money. Nor, two years later, did I join the allegedly half a million souls who trekked to Woodstock to try to set their souls free, as Joni Mitchell expressed it in her song which one-hit-wonders Matthews Southern Comfort took to the top of the UK charts the following summer. I was back at the Co-op.

Some years later, probably in 1994, the twenty fifth anniversary, I watched a TV documentary about Woodstock, which featured interviews with some of the “beautiful people” who had been there. They were unanimous in their verdict: “we talked a lot about free love, but we have realised that there is no such thing: love is always costly”.

That puts me in mind of the two elderly Jewish ladies who, for some reason, were on the visiting list of the now defunct parish of St. Augustine, Preston, where I did my diaconate placement in the summer of 1975. (It beat working at the Co-op.) One of these ladies commented “Religion is the Lord, and religion is love, and love means sacrifice”.

This old lady had reached the same conclusion, though I suspect by a very different route, as the Woodstock veterans: namely that love is always costly. We can, I feel, leave to one side the theoretically correct, but experientially questionable claim that God’s love is free. It is freely given, but accepting it will inevitably entail sacrifice, and a sharing in the Cross.

If we doubted that, we have it spelt out by Our Lord in His call to mutual love which we have just heard. “No one can show greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” St. John sets this call in the context of the Last Supper, where Jesus has already summoned His friends to mutual service by washing their feet, and from which He will depart to provide the supreme example of sacrificial love by undergoing His passion and death.

Jesus’ great commandment is a commandment of love, a love made possible by the sacrificial love of Father and Son through the agency of the Holy Spirit; a love which will always demand sacrifice on our part.

That self-sacrificing love which entails the laying down of our lives must be seen in small things, otherwise we shall not be capable of the greater sacrifice. One thing which I gained from my summers at the Co-op was the memory of a cartoon, one of a number drawn on the wall of the Carpet Sewing Room, all the work of an artistic employee, and all featuring the Peanuts characters of Charles Schultz.

The one which lodged in my mind was a night-time scene, with a crescent moon in the sky, and Snoopy lying on top of his kennel. On the back doorstep of his house stood Charlie Brown, clad in his pyjamas, and holding a glass of water. Underneath was the caption: “Love is bringing someone a glass of water in the middle of the night”.

An anti-climax, isn’t it—bathos? Yet it expresses a profound truth. I have often quoted it in wedding homilies. If we are not prepared to make the small sacrifices of love, we shall never be capable of the greater. And to give a nod to the First Reading: the Holy Spirit has been poured out on us to make us able. 

5th Sunday Easter

5th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 9:26-31; 1John 3:18-24; John 15: 1-8

What do I know about horticulture? Nothing. What do I know about viticulture (the care of vines)? Less than nothing. Where are we going with today’s Gospel? Let’s dive in and find out.

I have to confess that, unless it had bunches of grapes hanging from it, I wouldn’t recognise a vine if it poked me in the eye. In one of my previous parishes, one of the tabernacle covers carried a depiction of vine leaves. To be honest, I thought they were ivy. On the other hand, I am just about capable of recognising a rose bush, so I will start from there.

The first question which strikes me is “What is the difference between cutting away and pruning?” Would it be fair to say that they are the two sides of the same coin? The dead branches, and those which are not going to flourish further, are cut away, which amounts to a pruning of the whole bush.

When this pruning has been done, what is left? Precious little, it seems to me: not much more than a stump. Yet apparently this has to be done if the bush is to retain its value, to continue to fulfil its purpose. As long as there is something arising from the main stem, there is hope of life: yet it seems to be a fairly brutal business.

Our Lord’s description of viticulture is equally brutal. The unfruitful branches are lopped off, whereupon they wither, after which they go on the bonfire. Seemingly, they don’t even have a future as compost.

How does this apply to us—to us as individuals, and to us as the Church? The message seems, at one level, very straightforward. If we remain rooted in Christ, we will bear fruit, and all will be well. If, on the other hand, we do not allow Christ to bear fruit through us, to run through us like sap through the branches, we have no future.

So far, so good: but where does the pruning come in? Is there any one of you who has not been through pain and loss? Is there anyone who has not had to give up something precious, something without which you felt, at the time, that you could not survive? Bereavement is the most obvious example, but there are other things such as the breakdown of a relationship, the loss of a job, the failure of a project, or a collapse in health.

Have these losses destroyed you, as you felt they were doing at the time, or have you come through them leaner, fitter, more positive, more determined, perhaps with an enhanced gift of compassion, and a renewed sense of your need of God, and of union with Jesus Christ, that same God who, you initially thought, had abandoned you? I cannot answer that question for you, but it is worth pondering: have the prunings which you have undergone made you stronger or weaker, better or worse?

And what about the Church? She is going through a very drastic process of pruning at present. So much rottenness has been found among the branches in terms of abuse by clergy, and the cutting away of branches still has a way to go. You won’t be surprised to find me adding the rottenness of cowardly bishops and religious superiors, who are happy to sacrifice innocent priests and monks in order to cover their own backs, a rottenness which the institution is still unwilling to admit.

There is still more. The sin of clericalism, to which Pope Francis repeatedly draws attention—the sense of superiority and of entitlement to lord it over others—is still rampant. The present Holy Father is a gift from God to the Church, initiating a process of root and branch reform, but he is meeting bitter, and literally diabolic opposition, principally in the United States, where the majority of Catholics remain faithful, but where a minority, including some bishops and priests, appear to believe that their allegiance is to be given to Donald Trump, rather than to Jesus Christ.

There is an ancient adage, ecclesia semper reformanda , “the Church always in need of reform”, and what is true of the Church is equally true of us as individuals. We constantly need the vinedresser to be at work, pruning us, cutting us back, enabling us to bear more fruit for Christ.

4th Sunday Easter

4th  Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 4:8-12; 1 John 3:1-2;  John 10:11-18

I am not cut out to be a shepherd in the usual sense of the word. If I had ever doubted that, my doubts would have been laid to rest on my first Easter Sunday in the wonderful and historic parish of St. Thomas the Apostle, Claughton-on-Brock, a truly rural parish, home to more sheep (and cows) than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

Directly opposite the church is a field, and after Mass on Easter Sunday I noticed that a lamb had emerged from that same field through a gap in the fence and was now wandering disconsolately along the grass verge, to the evident distress of its mother.

Enlisting the help of a parishioner, I decided to apply science to the problem. The parishioner and I took up positions several yards apart, with the lamb, and the gap in the fence, between us. The plan was to advance slowly on the lamb from both directions, and so to shepherd it (there’s the word) towards and through the gap, to rejoin the plaintively bleating ewe.

We had reckoned without the ingenuity, perversity, and dexterity of lambs. Sensing a plot, the creature set off at a rate of knots, darted between my legs, and hurtled along the grass verge, before making its way through another gap, and trotting serenely back to its mother. Did it wink at us? I can’t be sure.

So who said that sheep are stupid? Not I, not after that episode, nor indeed after watching sheep at work among the picnickers on the fells of the Lake District or Peak District. More than once, I have seen sheep trample over relaxing fell walkers, as they make a bee line for the backpacks and rucksacks where they know that food will be concealed. In go their heads, and out come the sandwiches, to be held against all comers, and munched enthusiastically, while all the time the raider keeps a wary eye open for counter attacks. Stupid? No! Docile? Not on your life! Crafty? Yes! Thuggish? Not half!

In speaking of Himself as the Good Shepherd, Our Lord never makes the claim that sheep are stupid. They need protection, they need to be known and loved, but they are not fools. Far from being foolish, they have the wisdom to know the Good Shepherd, to recognise His love for them, and to respond.

“I know my own, and my own know me” says Jesus: it is a two way process. He then goes further: “Just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father”. Ponder those words: they are actually breathtaking. The relationship of knowing love, or of loving knowledge, between the sheep and the Good Shepherd, between us and the Son of God, is as close and intimate as the relationship between that same Son and the Father.

That is a remarkable statement. Do we work at our relationship with Jesus the Good Shepherd to make it a statement of the truth?

This moves us on to another question: what about the relationship between priests and people? (Technically, we should begin with bishops and people, but we will settle for something more manageable.) In these days, where a priest will probably be responsible for three parishes, it may seem impossible for that mutual love and knowledge to exist. Certainly the days are long gone when the parish priest and his curates would set out, census books in hand, to knock on the door of every  Catholic, whose personal history was well known and documented.

So what can be done? Being no longer in a parish, I have no intention of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, to pontificate to my brother priests about what they should be doing. All I can envisage is an adaptation of the old principles to a changed situation: openness; availability; visibility; genuine love, concern, and interest, especially for the less attractive—but above all that knowledge of the Good Shepherd which is rooted in deep prayer.

3rd Sunday of Easter

3rd Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2:1-5; Luke 24:35-48

Many many moons ago, speaking to a gaggle of urchins in the now long defunct Junior Seminary, I asked “Which is the longest season in the Church’s year?” One smart youth raised his hand and replied “Ordinary Time”. Clever so-and –so! No wonder he is now Vicar General of the Diocese.

At one level, he was correct. The greater part of the year is indeed what we term “Ordinary Time”, when vestments are common or garden green, and we are not focusing on any particular event in the life, death, and resurrection of Our Lord. Ordinary Time, though, is not usually reckoned as a season, and it was not what I had in mind.

The answer for which I was searching was Easter, which is, to some people’s surprise, longer than Lent, the latter appearing to be endless because of the penances we undertake. The season of resurrection, the season of joy, is longer than the season of penitence and mourning.

Indeed, there is a sense in which it is always Easter because Christ is risen. Notice that we say “Christ IS risen” rather than “Christ HAS risen, because the resurrection is a present state, and not only a past event.

Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection: every Mass is a celebration of the resurrection. Yet there is a note of caution to be sounded: every Mass makes present, not only the resurrection of the Lord, but also His Passion and death. Those events of Passion, death, and resurrection are interwoven, inseparable: we cannot have one without the others.

We live in the light of the risen Christ, but we live also in the mystery of His suffering and death. We are the Easter People, as Pope St. John Paul II was fond of reminding us, but we are also the Ash Wednesday People, the Holy Thursday night People, the Good Friday People.

These are not simply truths which we profess: they also play out in our lives. We too have our seasons of wilderness wandering, of Gethsemane anguish, of Calvary darkness, as well as our seasons of Easter joy. They may coincide with the Church’s seasons, or they may not. Often they are woven together, suffering shot through with joy: celebration tempered by sorrow.

It is important that we recognise them for what they are—sharings in the suffering, in the death, and  in the resurrection of the Lord. All of these Christ-events are present realities, and all of them find a place in the pilgrim journey of His people.

There is another event too which we must not neglect. The season of Easter leads us to Pentecost, the feast of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We are also the Pentecost People, filled, guided, and moved by the Holy Spirit; though we should never forget that the Spirit came not only in the wind and flame of Pentecost, but also in the gentle breathing of the Lord on Easter Sunday evening, when he breathed on the disciples and declared “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

So we are at one and the same time the Lent People, the Passiontide People, the Easter People and the Pentecost People. I might add that we are also the Advent People, constantly looking forward to the return of Christ in glory, but also seeking to recognise His present coming in the people and events of everyday. And in deference to that canny youth of yesteryear, perhaps it should also be said that we are the Ordinary Time People, living in the presence of, and sharing the life of, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the mundane apparent non-events of everyday life.

Sunday of Easter Octave

2nd Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 5:1-6; John 20: 19-31

Has it ever struck you that Easter Sunday morning’s Gospel is truncated, cut short? The Beloved Disciple enters the tomb, “he saw, and he believed”, and that is more or less it, apart from a comment about previous lack of belief. We are left with a cliff hanger: you can imagine “to be continued” appearing across the TV screen.

Why should this be? Why was it decided to leave the Gospel at that point when, only a few verses later, we have the encounter between the Magdalene and the risen Christ?

It was to emphasise the emptiness of the tomb; to focus our attention on the absence of Our Lord’s body. This in its turn was done to underline the physical reality of the resurrection. What the women and, subsequently, the apostles, met was not a wraith or a phantom; it was truly Jesus the Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, to borrow a phrase from another context.

This physicality is stressed in today’s Gospel. The risen Christ is able to pass through closed and locked doors: nevertheless, His body is substantial, as He demonstrates when He shows the frightened disciples the wounds of His hands and side.

As a matter of interest, why were they frightened? They had been told by the women that Jesus was risen and that they had met Him. Among them was John who, we were told last week, had seen the empty tomb and the grave clothes, “and believed”. Furthermore, they had been told over and over again by Jesus that He would rise from the dead: so why were they still cowering in fear?

It comes down to human nature, doesn’t it? Despite all the talk about “glass half full” and “glass half empty” people, we are by birth, upbringing, and experience, natural pessimists. The promise of resurrection, and even the women’s testimony to the resurrection, was simply too good to be true.

Has it ever struck you that we never say “It’s too bad to be true”? We are always willing to believe the worst: to believe the best is so much more difficult. Partly, this is the result of experience: many people seem to undergo more bad times than good. Partly, though, it is also an attitude of mind: we are innately suspicious of good news.

Yet the risen Jesus stands among the ten—as they were at that moment, with Judas gone and Thomas absent—to prove that Good News, which we can write with capital letters, is true, is real: in fact, is the only enduring reality. It is bad news which, ultimately, is the myth. Or perhaps we should say, not the myth—for the wounds of Christ are real enough and are not removed by the resurrection—but ephemeral, passing, temporary. It is the Good News which is lasting, substantial, permanent.

And if that Easter Sunday evening appearance isn’t enough to convince us of this, there is more. Along comes Thomas, whom we can identify with Everyman (or Everyone, as we should probably say) the man on the Clapham omnibus, so beloved of early twentieth century writers; the woman on the No. 51 into Carnforth. He speaks for today’s society when he says “Prove it”. Scepticism rules the roost today: unless we have been there and brought back the T-shirt, we refuse to believe in anything.

Thomas demands physical evidence, so Jesus returns and says “Right! Give me your finger. There! I have put it into the nail hole. Give me your hand. Can you feel that gaping wound? Is that physical enough for you?”

It is. Thomas accepts the reality which he can see and feel, and then has the courage and the wisdom to go further; to accept the reality which he cannot see and feel, but can now infer, namely that the Risen Lord is God. Thus we have the first affirmation of the divinity of Christ, as Thomas declares “My Lord and my God”.

What about us? as a popular song asked a few years ago. Like me, you may have been brought up to pray Thomas’ words “My Lord and my God” silently at the elevation of Our Lord’s Body and Blood during the Mass. Like Thomas, we can see a physical reality: do we still, like Thomas, have the faith to go further and to proclaim our faith in the divinity and its present reality? Why would we not, as we learn that there is nothing which God gives us which is too good to be true?

Easter Sunday

THE EASTER VIGIL 2021

It’s a shambles! The Easter Vigil, I mean, and not just this Easter Vigil, with its regulations and restrictions, but the Easter Vigil per se. It was clearly designed by a committee: bits stick out at all angles.

You are probably aware of the definition of a camel as “a horse designed by a committee”. Well, the Vigil is a liturgical camel.

Notice how many times the ceremonies reach a high point, only to dive down again, before there is another leap up. We are riding a prayerful Big Dipper. The first summit comes with the third Lumen Christi, when the paschal candle is held aloft, the church lights all flash on, and the candle is placed in the stand and incensed, before a heavenly voice intones the Exsultet—“Rejoice heavenly powers…” and we ascend to heights of sublimity.

Then, in an instant, we are back down to earth, as we return to the very beginning of things, and read from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). Often, as this year, we are taken right back to our origins, as we hear that beautifully poetic creation narrative, of a world which God pronounced to be “very good”; always we hear of the crossing of the Red Sea, when the Jewish people were saved by water, as we are saved by the water of baptism, the Easter sacrament.

In my younger and more radical days I used to change the order, having the Old Testament readings first, before heading out to bless the fire and the candle, giving a steady rise to the high point of the Exsultet. With the passing of the years, one becomes more conformist, more “oh blow it!” in attitude, more willing to go with the flow.

So I climbed back onto the Big Dipper, which, after the final Old Testament reading, ascends to a new summit with the Gloria. Never will I forget my first Easter Vigil in the seminary when, at this point, the organ thundered out, the kettle drums and tubular bells joined in, and, as someone pulled a string, the purple hangings covering the frescoes behind the altar all fell down at once. Glorious liturgical kitsch: I felt that I was in heaven.

Inevitably, we are back to the ground with our reading from St. Paul, drawing our attention to the link between the Resurrection and baptism, before we hit the heights again with the triple Alleluia. After this, the Mass continues as usual until the final joy of the sung dismissal, followed by a rousing Easter hymn, at Ushaw always “Thine be the glory”.

So a wonderful, wonderful, awesome celebration; a worthy high point of the year, a glorious sharing in the joy of the risen Christ—but a shambles all the same.

And perhaps it is right that our greatest celebration should be a shambles, because life is a shambles, and the world is a shambles, and the Church is a shambles, and you and I are a shambles. Yet it doesn’t matter, because into the shambles comes a dead man walking, a man with pierced hands and feet, and a pierced side, who says to us “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about the shambles, because I have seen it, and I have plunged into the heart of it, and it has killed me.

“Don’t worry about that either, because I have overcome death, and the shambles, and the wounds, and I am alive again. Look at my wounds. Put your hands into them , and recognize in them the sanctification of the shambles, and of death, and of you.

“Embrace the shambles of the world, and of the Church, and of yourself; live it to the full. And enjoy the shambles of the Vigil, because it proclaims that in the midst of every shambles, glorious like this, or dark and painful, I AM, conquering and healing. It is a shambles, but it is a superb, divine shambles. Enjoy it to the full, for I am risen.”

Holy Thursday

Holy  Thursday 2021

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1Cor 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-15

You may remember that around thirty to forty years ago, the custom grew in many parishes and other settings of celebrating something resembling a Passover meal, on or around Holy Thursday.

There would be a seder dish, with the symbolic foods used at Passover, and an explanation would be provided of each of them. There was the question and answer which takes place between father and eldest son in a Jewish household, beginning “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The prayers of Passover would be offered, and it would be pointed out at what point in the meal Jesus would have blessed the bread which became His Body, and which of the ritual cups would have been transformed into His Blood.

As a teaching aid, it was extremely valuable, setting the Last Supper, and hence the Mass, in its original context, taking us back to the roots of our celebration, guarding against the opposite dangers of over-simplification—the idea that Jesus and His disciples “simply had a meal”, which ignores the highly ritualised nature of this particular meal—and over-elaboration, turning the Eucharist into a performance.

Eventually, however, it was banned by the hierarchy on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it could offend the Jewish people, and could be interpreted by them as a form of mimickry, though I could mention that one such celebration which I attended was presided over by a Rabbi.

Yet whilst we are no longer permitted to demonstrate in this way the link between the Passover and the Eucharist, it is important that we should be conscious of that link. Hence, we always have as our First Reading on this night the account of the original Passover, followed immediately by St. Paul’s account of the institution of the Eucharist, which was put into writing before any of the Gospels were written down.

Thus we hear of the Paschal Lamb which was slain, its blood smeared on the doorposts to save the people of Israel from slavery, and can make the connection with Jesus, the true Paschal Lamb, whose blood was shed on the Cross to redeem the world from sin, and is now smeared on the lips of the faithful (as one of the early Church Fathers expresses it) as we share in the Passover from death into life.

We are also introduced to the concept of “memorial”, handed down to us by the Jewish people. When the Jews celebrate Passover, they are not merely remembering a past event, they are making the past present: they are with their ancestors escaping from slavery.

Similarly, when we celebrate Mass, we are not remembering something which happened two thousand years ago; we are participating in those events, made present for us now. This is the meaning of “memorial”. The transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Lord, and the offering of that Body and Blood in sacrifice to the Father in the crucifixion and resurrection, are a present reality. Hence the widespread annoyance that the most recent changes in the translation of the Mass left untouched the unfortunate expression “in memory of me”, when “as a memorial of me” would have been more appropriate, as conveying more accurately that sense of the past made present.

In using St. John’s account of the Last Supper on this night, the Church is reminding us of another important truth. John doesn’t describe the institution of the Eucharist: he has already given us his Eucharistic discourse in chapter six. Instead, he recounts Jesus’ action in washing His disciples’ feet, a reminder that Eucharist and service are inseparable. If our Eucharistic celebration, our Mass, is to be complete, we must be people of loving service, people who literally or metaphorically wash the feet of others. From the Mass, we must go out to love and serve, for if we fail to do that, our making present of the Lord’s sacrifice, and our receiving of His Body and Blood, will be a contradiction. The love of God, shown to us and celebrated by us in the Mass, must be a reality in our daily lives.