29th Sunday Year B

29th Sunday 2021

Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45

Those of you who attended Sr. Reina’s Final Profession last Sunday will recall the challenging readings which Sister chose, beginning “My child, if you aspire to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal,” from the book of Ecclesiasticus. Fr. Peter, in his homily, picked up on this theme, and warned that, along with the joys and successes, there will be difficulties and even disasters.

A year or two or three before Sister Reina’s Profession, I recall that, at my diaconate ordination, I received a card which quoted Our Lord’s closing words from today’s Gospel: “The Son of Man Himself came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many”.

The two messages, from occasions in fact forty six years apart, are essentially the same. We are called—and that means not just sisters or priests but all the baptised—to be the Body of the Son of Man, who came to serve and to suffer. A religious sister assumes that role in a very public way, as a sign to the rest of the Church and to the world, but it is a role to which every Christian is committed.

We hear it expressed today, firstly by Deutero-Isaiah (Second Isaiah) in one of his Songs of the Suffering Servant. These songs are, for us, associated particularly with Holy Week, when we hear how Jesus, Son and Servant, fitted perfectly the description of the Servant crushed with suffering, offering His life in atonement, taking the faults of many on Himself. Can you see how you, to a lesser degree, fit within that context, uniting your own sufferings and difficulties with those of Jesus, offering them to the Father for the salvation of the world, making up by them, as St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, all that has still to be undergone in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His Body, the Church?

In the Second Reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear Jesus described as the Supreme High Priest. Why? Because He has suffered and died, taking His own blood into the true Holy of Holies, the presence of God, as the priests took the blood of sacrificed animals into the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. This true priest is one of us, “feeling our weaknesses with us”, being tempted as we are; and we, by our baptism and confirmation are anointed by the Holy Spirit as priests with and in Him.

Finally, in the Gospel, Our Lord points out to James and John and, by extension, to the rest of us, that we are called to receive His baptism and to drink His cup. “That’s fine,” you may say: “I have been baptised, and I drink the cup of His Blood.” True, but the baptism and the cup here have a fuller and a deeper meaning. Jesus, already baptised by John, still has another baptism to endure, a baptism of blood; still has another cup to drink, that cup of suffering which He prayed, in the Garden of the Agony, might pass Him by. He now asks us, as He asked the two brothers, whether we can share His baptism and His cup. How do you answer that question?

All of this we must do without pretensions, without swank, without seeking earthly power. In line with these words of Our Lord, Pope Francis has stated that anyone who wishes to be a bishop is the last person who should become one. That may seem obvious to you and me, but there are people who actually long to be bishops. Indeed, there was a cardinal at the last conclave who allegedly lost favour because he was said to be actively canvassing for votes to become pope. Similarly, the American cardinal who is most prominent in his criticism of the Holy Father is notorious for swanning around in a cappa magna, the huge flowing train beloved of the prince bishops of old, behaviour which surely runs contrary to Our Lord’s strictures on broader phylacteries and longer tassels.

Does all this sound a little gloomy, as if following Christ, being part of the Body of Christ, is all self-denial and suffering? It isn’t. The joy and fulfilment in Our Lord’s life are very evident in the Gospels. I suspect that the true message is that, only by seeking to live in Christ and to imitate His life of service, will we find that joy and fulfilment. There is no room for that superficial, spurious joy of the “Smile, Jesus loves you” variety. Only my awareness that it would not be very Christlike keeps me from wanting to bop the “Smile...” brigade on the nose and to say “Try smiling now, sunshine.” Joy there is, but only in the context of service.

28th Sunday year B

28th Sunday 2021

Wisdom 7:7-11; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30

“I prayed and understanding was given me; I entreated and the spirit of Wisdom came to me.”

But what is Wisdom, spelt with a capital letter? In the Old Testament, it tends to mean God’s word, expressed in the scriptures. Some of the early Church Fathers identified it with the Word, also spelt with a capital, meaning the Word-made-flesh, the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s Word taking flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Others of the Fathers saw it rather as the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who pours wisdom (with a small w) down upon us.

However we view wisdom, true wisdom is something which comes from God, and is somehow an expression and a presence of God Himself. That is how the author of the Letter to the Hebrews views it, identifying it with God’s scriptural word, but also with God Himself from whom, we are told, no created thing can hide and to whose eyes everything is laid open.

So God’s word, whether with a small or a capital “w”, penetrates us, and opens us up to God Himself. Does that happen to you and me when we read or hear the scriptures? Do you ponder on the scriptures, and especially the Gospels, asking yourself what a particular passage may imply for you and your life? Perhaps today, after Mass, you could spend some time reflecting on that episode of the rich man, and considering how you respond to the presence and the call of Jesus.

When you think of the Word with a capital letter, imagine yourself as that man, in the presence of Jesus, for so you are. He looks at you, and He loves you. What call is he giving you today, at this particular moment in your life and the life of the planet? How does that call strike you, and how willing are you to respond to it?

Does it make you uncomfortable, as it made the rich man? I hope that it does: if God’s call does not disturb us, then we are either complacent or unheeding. Where does that discomfort lead you? Do you, like the rich man of the Gospel, go away sad, unwilling to answer that call?

Again, if you walk away and are not sad, there is something amiss. If your negative response doesn’t niggle you, doesn’t leave you uneasy, then you have missed the point. You haven’t opened yourself to God’s word, enabling it to cut into you like a precise surgical implement, nor have you opened yourself to His Word Jesus Christ, who comes to you both in the written word and in a personal encounter.

As long as there is sadness, as long as there is unease, there is hope. Did that man thrust away his sadness, and simply return to his unfulfilled life? Or did his sadness gnaw away at him, until he felt obliged to seek out Jesus again, this time to answer “Yes”?

If you have said “Yes” to Jesus, He will unfold to you gradually what form that “yes” will take, what impact it will have on your life. As He told Peter, there will be both losses and gains, but in God’s good time and in eternity, the latter will outweigh the former.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. John Henry Newman, the most recently canonised English saint. Newman wrote a novel entitled “Loss and Gain”, because His “Yes” to Jesus’ call entailed the loss of all that he had received in terms of honour, respect, and much that was fulfilling in his life as an Anglican clergyman, to be replaced by suspicion and criticism from both outside and within the Roman communion, until he was finally vindicated by the award of a red hat by Pope Leo XIII.

It may well be that Jesus is not asking you for as radical a change as those required of Newman or the rich man of the Gospel, but who knows? He has looked at you and loved you with that piercing blade-like look which allows no hiding place, that look which, at cockcrow in the High Priest’s courtyard, made Peter go out and weep bitterly. What effect does that look have on you?

27th Sunday Year B

27th Sunday 2021 

Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16

I love that First Reading, part of the second creation account from the Book of Genesis: it is one of the most glorious pieces of poetry ever written. You can envisage the scene: God, having created the man, now wondering what to do with him. It is a very different insight from the evolutionary approach taken in Genesis chapter one, accounting for the complementarity of the sexes in a literary, rather than a literal way.

There is almost an evolution in God’s thought processes as imagined here; imagined, indeed, rather mischievously. “Right”, thinks God, “I have made this creature called man, but he is a bit of a sore thumb at the moment. He needs a companion. I shall make animals, and see if they will be enough.”

So the man sits there, and gives names to the animals and birds as God brings them to him. “That’s a cow, and that’s a horse, and I’ll call that funny looking one a duck billed platypus. What’s next?”

“Aye, you’re right” says God. “You need a ‘next’, don’t you? Right, I have just created anaesthetic, so I am going to put you to sleep, and perform the first operation.”

So God puts the man—let’s call him Adam, which is Hebrew for “man”—to sleep, and forms his mate/companion/significant other/other half, out of him. And when the man wakes up, he has a totally different reaction from anything that went before. You can almost see him leaping up and down with excitement: “Yippee! Yabadabadoo! This is what I’ve been looking for! This is part of me, bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh—we need to put ourselves together again!” And so, best beloved, we have the sacrament of marriage.

Then along come the dull and dopey atheists (or so called atheists, as I don’t actually believe in the existence of atheists) shouting, in their literalist manner, “It’s not true! It didn’t happen like that! It’s not scientific!”

Of course it isn’t, you dingbats! It’s not supposed to be. Have you never heard of poetry? Have you never read Tolkien? No, of course you haven’t. If it doesn’t fit in with your own colourless, dreary, literalistic mindset, you are not interested. You don’t actually believe in science, but in scientism, a false religion which is to genuine science what Islamism is to genuine Islam. You really do need to get out more.

Our Lord takes, as the basis of His pronouncement on marriage, this insight of Genesis that marriage is rooted in the very nature of human beings; that it entails a fulfilment of that nature. The union which constitutes marriage is a complete union, making one person out of two.

Yet Jesus was the first to accept the fallibility of human nature, its lack of that completeness which is the literal meaning of perfection. At one level, it is startling that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews states that God made the man Jesus “perfect through suffering”. This doesn’t mean that Jesus was imperfect, in our usual sense of the term, but that, until He suffered, He was incomplete as a human being: He lacked something of human experience.

Always, He could recognise that incompletion in others, and was compassionate with it. He set out the nature of marriage, but was always gentle and forgiving with people who fell short of the ideal, and that must be our approach too. We must maintain the essential rootedness of marriage, whilst being compassionate with individuals, and in particular not seeking to compel people to remain in abusive relationships which are in themselves a denial of marriage.

We are also increasingly realising that there are people whose basic nature does not reflect the complementarity of the sexes, but are drawn by nature towards others of the same sex. That is a situation which calls for much more prayer and reflection than it has yet received.

26th Sunday Year B

26th Sunday 2021

Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

Are today’s readings positive, affirming, encouraging? Or are they stern, alarming, frightening? The answer, I think, is “Yes”. They are both, holding both encouragement and warning, promise and alarm.

The reading from the Book of Numbers is probably the most consistently positive. The Spirit comes down on the seventy elders and gives them the power of prophets. There is, for someone whose pronunciation of English takes a northern form, something particularly comforting about the names of the two outsiders, who receive the gift of prophecy, even though they did not go to the Tent of Meeting: it is very affirming to hear that Eldad and Medad (mi dad=my dad) are prophesying in the camp.

On a more serious note, Moses’ attitude to these two is also encouraging. He accepts their right to prophesy, and refuses to stop them. Indeed, he goes further: “If only the whole people of the Lord were prophets, and the Lord gave His Spirit to them all”.

Wait a minute, though. The whole people of the Lord ARE prophets, and the Lord HAS given His Spirit to us all. Have we not all been baptised? Have not most of us been confirmed? This is not the place to discuss whether it is right to separate confirmation from baptism as a different sacrament: suffice it to say that God’s Spirit is given to us in both. Why is that Spirit given to us? The prayer which accompanies the anointing with chrism immediately after baptism gives the best explanation. In the old translation, it reads: “as Christ was anointed priest, prophet, and king, so may you live always as a member of His body...” So the Church, and you as a member of it, have received the Holy Spirit and have been anointed to be a prophet.

“Grand as owt!” you may say. “When do I begin?”

It is to be hoped that you have already begun. St. James gives us a clue. We are to denounce injustice, exploitation, neglect of the poor, and failure to be aware of them. Wait a minute though! To whom do we prophesy first? Must it not be to ourselves, complicit as we are, as members of the developed world, in the exploitation of the developing world, (which we used to call, rather patronisingly, “the third world”)?

To take an immediate example: have you supported attempts to persuade the government to ensure that sufficient supplies of vaccines to fight COVID are made available to the developing world? That seems to me to be a prophetic duty. And have you interrogated yourself as to how your own lifestyle may contribute, not only to the oppression of the poor, but also to the degradation of the planet, an issue of daily increasing urgency?

From the days of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope Francis’ Laudato si and Fratelli tuti the Catholic Church’s social teaching has consistently spoken prophetically of the demands of justice; but unless we apply those messages to our own lives, we are liable to find James’ condemnations being applied to us.

So, James offers us both encouragement and stark warning. The same is true of Jesus in today’s Gospel. Our Lord takes a positive and inclusive approach to those who act positively in His name. Indeed, He goes further, promising to reward apparent outsiders, who are kind to His disciples.

Yet He is uncompromising in His attitude towards those who exploit others, especially “the little ones who have faith”. I suspect that it is impossible to hear those words today without thinking of child abuse, and especially child abuse by the clergy and others who represent the Church.

But there are no grounds for anyone to be complacent, as Jesus goes on to insist that we must all be uncompromising in opposing and rooting out the deep causes of our own sins, those tendencies in each one of us which prevent us from realising our full potential as children of God. So our readings today present us with both encouragement and warning: God is on our side, but we have to respond and play our part.

25th Week

25th Sunday

St. James would have fitted well into the world of modern psychology. He has grasped a principle which is at the heart of current understanding of the human condition, namely that we have to look within ourselves for the root of many of our difficulties.

Searching for an explanation of conflict, James puts the question “Isn’t it precisely in the desires fighting within your own selves?”. Of course, many people are the victims of violence by others, but when we ourselves are roused to anger, or even rage, when we feel frustrated over what we don’t have, then we need to look within for the source of our dissatisfaction, bitterness, resentment, rather than blame other people, or ill fortune, for the way we feel.

It may well be, as the psychologists tend to suggest, that we are deeply influenced by what happened to us in childhood, or even in the womb, but we then have to take responsibility for our own response to these influences. We all have distinct personalities, shaped by nature and nurture, (or by heredity and environment, to use more technical terms) but God has given us free will in our living out of those personalities.

If we are honest, we have to accept that most of us are prone to selfishness, which is perhaps the root of all sin. From this selfishness arise the jealousy and ambition of which St. James complains, and which we see working out in the behaviour and attitude of the disciples. Rather than focus their attention on the Lord, and on His prophecy of suffering, death, and resurrection, they fall into an argument about which of them is the greatest, revealing their own jealousy and ambition very sharply.

From our viewpoint, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to criticise the first followers of Our Lord. We would like to think that, if we had had the advantages of seeing Him face to face, of hearing Him speak, of spending time in His company, our behaviour would have been very different.

Really? (Or “seriously?” to use the current expression.) We do hear Him speak to us in the Gospels, we spend time in His company every time we pray, we encounter Him intimately in the Blessed Sacrament, and is our behaviour really any better than that of the apostles? How often do we criticise other people? How often do we pass judgement on their faults? On the other hand, how rarely do we look into ourselves honestly and thoroughly, to recognise the selfishness and self-absorption which drive so many of our actions?

To give you an example: my computer frequently drives me to distraction. When things go wrong, I often fall into a blind panic. I catastrophise, as the experts would say, assuming that total disaster has struck; and then I expect someone to come and fix the problem here and now, making my needs their priority.

No doubt the shrinks would have a field day, with my reaction. But in all honesty, I don’t need them to tell me that I am indulging in pure selfishness, that I am making myself the centre of the universe, entitled to have everything run exactly as I wish.

I am also, strangely enough, displaying a lack of faith. St. James hints at this when he comments “The reason you don’t have what you want is that you don’t pray for it” or “You don’t pray properly”. If I had the trust, the faith, the gumption, to place the whole situation in God’s hands, my computer might not work any better, but I would have a sense of proportion, a realisation of how much or how little things really matter in God’s sight and in the context of His love for me.

That perhaps is the real issue. If only we could realise how much God loves us, we would lose much of our selfishness at a stroke. We would not feel the urge to compare ourselves with others, because we would be secure in knowing that we are loved, that we are infinitely precious in God’s sight.

Today take some time to reflect on the truth that God’s Son died out of pure love for you, to consider how intensely He must therefore love you. If only we could do that seriously and thoroughly, we would lose much of our insecurity, and be freed to love in return, with no need for that jealousy or selfish ambition identified by St. James.

24th Sunday Year B

24th Sunday 2021

Isaiah 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

Blooming ‘eck, Peter! You weren’t expecting that, were you? After all, you were only doing your job. According to Matthew, the Lord had just named you as the rock on which He was going to build His Church, and this was your opportunity to show Him what a good choice He had made.

And you went the right way about it. You took Jesus to one side, exactly as He had described how you and the rest should deal with problems: there was no question of making a public fuss. Then you quietly told Him that, with you in charge, this didn’t need to happen.

You must have been feeling that you had done a really good job: your first challenge in your new role, and you had handled it perfectly. Then this happened. You were absolutely humiliated. You were called Satan, you who, just a few minutes before, had been told that God had inspired you. Yet now you were in trouble for not thinking in God’s way. Not only bruised, battered, and humiliated; you must have been thoroughly confused.

To be honest, I don’t think you should take it too personally. You simply happen to have pressed a very sensitive button. With the best will in the world, and completely without intending to, you had tempted the Lord to turn aside from His mission, to avoid the way of suffering: and it was one heck of a temptation.

Did you notice what Jesus did when you spoke to Him? He turned away from you, because He could feel the force and the attraction of what you were saying. Did He want to suffer? Of course not: and you were offering Him a way out, an offer which was hugely tempting.

That’s why He called you Satan. He wasn’t actually speaking to you, but to Satan, the Tempter, who was using you, using your voice, the voice of a friend, and what is a stronger temptation than that? If you really dread something, and your friend tells you that you needn’t go through with it, aren’t you mightily tempted to go along with him? Jesus is fully human, so He would have felt the same. That’s why He turned away from you, and in doing that, He saw the others, and He knew that He had to go through it for them, and for all the others who had gone before them, and all those who would come after them, until the end of time—but it was a close thing.

As for being inspired by God, and then thinking not in God’s way but man’s, that’s a tricky one. You will learn, and your successors will learn, to trust entirely in God, allowing Him to speak through you, and not to trust your own judgement.

Finally, there is one more thing. Don’t forget what Jesus went on to say: that all of us will have to suffer, taking His way, not our own, and carrying our cross in His footsteps.

But don’t worry. He will be with you, and with the rest of us. He will, in the end, give you courage beyond anything you could imagine, and He will tell you to strengthen us all. So don’t be downhearted, Peter. There will be setbacks along the way—massive setbacks, indeed—but you will be a source of strength and encouragement for millions yet to be born.

23rd Sunday Year B

23rd Sunday2021

Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark7:31-37

Oh heck! It’s here again! Every three years, this Gospel passage recurs, and every three years I am transported straight back to the equivalent Sunday in 1976, the first Sunday of term at St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, my first Sunday as a member of staff, the oil of ordination still wet on my hands.

Every three years I recall the homily by the headmaster Fr. Peter O’Neill, as he focused on one sentence “He has done all things well” and told the two hundred or so lads assembled before him that they should so conduct themselves that, at the end of the year, people would say of them “He has done all things well”. Good headmasterly stuff, even if not quite Alan Bennett.

What are the things that Jesus had done well, and how far may we be expected to imitate them? He had, most recently, as we have just heard, cured a deaf man who had a speech impediment, and had thus fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which we heard in the First Reading.

Can we do that? “Can we heck as like!” I hear you cry. Wait a minute though. What really lies behind Jesus’ miracle here? It is a sign that the Kingdom of God, foretold by the prophets, has arrived. The cure of this man, important as it was for him, has a wider significance. To an extent, we are all deaf, and each of us has a speech impediment, until Jesus ushers in the Kingdom, touches our ears and our tongue, and enables us to hear and to speak clearly.

The Kingdom IS here, Jesus HAS touched our ears and our tongues and enabled us to hear and to speak clearly, if only we are willing. If we are prepared to listen, we can hear His message, and can convey it by word and action. Through the way we live, we can and should be “heralds of the Great King” as Francis of Assisi described himself.

When Pope St. John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary, he included as the third, “the proclamation of the Kingdom and the call to conversion”. The Kingdom of God is proclaimed to us, and we are constantly called to a conversion of life, to an ongoing adjustment of our lives in response to the call of Christ. This, in turn, calls us to be a sign of the Kingdom in the world, and therefore a channel of conversion for others, as they see the Kingdom at work in us.

Is it likely that we shall do this well? Maybe, maybe not: that isn’t really the point. We do it to the best of our ability, according to the gifts, talents, and graces which God gives us. GK Chesterton coined the expression “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. Of course we want to do worthwhile things well, but what matters is that we do them at all, and leave the results to God, who makes good our defects. Whether we have done them well or badly is not for us to decide; nor, pace Fr. O’Neill, is it for other people, but only for God.

What else are we called to do? Isaiah begins his prophecy with the words “Say to all faint hearts ‘Courage! Do not be afraid’”. All of us have faint hearts at times. We are weighed down by events; sometimes troubles seem to pile one upon another. Yet the Kingdom has been established by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, and so those words are addressed to us “Courage! Do not be afraid”.

At the root of the word “courage”, and of “encourage”, “discourage” is the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. The prophet, and Jesus the Lord, speak to our hearts, calling us to have strength, and an absence of fear, at the very root of our being—and then to convey that same strength, that same lack of fear to others, to be encouragers of others, people who put “heart” into others.

Do we do that, or are we among the negative people, the grumblers, the purveyors of misery? Do people recognise the joy of the Kingdom in us, a joy which is not to be identified with surface happiness, but which may exist along with deep unhappiness at times, because it comes from the very root of our being, where Jesus shares with us the Kingdom? We may never do all things well, but we can strive to be alive with the Kingdom, and so help to build that Kingdom among others.

22nd Sunday Year B

22nd Sunday 2021

Deut 4:1-2,6-8; James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Does the name Graham Poll mean anything to you?  I can think of a few people who will immediately recognise it, but I suspect that, for the majority, it will be a mystery. Did he perhaps invent the Poll Tax, or the polling booth, or a particularly short hair style?

None of these: in fact, he was an English football referee, who, in a relatively recent World Cup, ruined any chance he might have had of refereeing the Final when he committed a shocking blunder in a group game, showing the yellow card three times to a player before sending him off, the sort of howler you would not expect from the most junior referee on a park pitch, let alone a senior official in the world’s most famous competition.

A few years ago, someone lent me Graham Poll’s autobiography. What struck me, in reading it, was not his account of this incident, but a remark which he made, commenting along the lines: “Sometimes you know that, strictly, by the Laws of the Game, you should award a penalty, but morally it would be the wrong decision, and you don’t give it.”

I don’t recall whether I yelled with delight upon reading this, but I suspect that I did. In the autumn of 2014, I had spent my holidays, as I did for a number of years, refereeing in a schools’ competition in Canada. For one match, a final, I was assistant referee (linesman in old money) along with Dave, my host, an expatriate Lancastrian, whilst the whistle was taken by Joe, an expat Glaswegian.

One team, whom I shall call the Blues, dominated the match, outclassing their opponents, whom we shall name the Whites, but failing to add to the single goal which they had scored early in the game. As the match moved into stoppage time, Whites launched one last desperate attack. Their left wing back brought the ball down the wing, being pulled back, as he came, by a Blues’ defender. As he continued to make progress, Joe decided to apply the Advantage clause, until the attacker, still being unfairly harassed, reached the penalty area, whereupon Joe blew, and pointed to the spot.

All hell broke loose. The Blues went berserk. One of their players pushed Joe, and was sent off, whilst the occupants of the Blues’ substitutes’ bench, immediately behind me, were within a gnat’s breath of invading the pitch.

Eventually, order was restored, the penalty was taken, and converted, and the final whistle blew, facing us with extra time in a febrile atmosphere with one side down to ten men and nursing a huge sense of grievance.

During extra time, Whites, with their one man advantage, mounted an attack. One of their players made his way into the penalty area, twisting and turning, and eventually being caught by a defender’s foot, and going down. It was a clear penalty, right under my nose.

What did I do? I kept my flag firmly down by my side. It would have been dreadfully unjust, in the context of the game, for Whites to win by virtue of a second penalty. That I had no wish to be lynched by the Blues’ management and subs, who were breathing down my neck, was, of course, irrelevant.

Whether Joe had a clear view of the incident, I do not know. Perhaps he too saw the potential injustice of a strict application of the Law. In any case, his whistle remained silent, there were no further goals, and justice was achieved morally, if not by the letter of the Law, when Blues won the penalty shoot-out.

It seems to me that similar issue lies at the heart of Our Lord’s dispute with the Pharisees. Are laws, and in particular the Jewish Law, an end in themselves, or a means to an end? Moses had no doubt: the Law was intended to display the closeness of God to His people; to draw them ever closer to Him. To an extent, the Pharisees had forgotten this: for them, the Law and the laws had become ends in themselves, to be maintained at all costs, for their own sake. God had practically fallen out of the equation.

It is easy for us to become smug; to say “Silly old Pharisees. We would never behave like that.” OR WOULD WE?

21st Sunday Year B

21st Sunday 2021

Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18; Ephesians 5:21-32. John 6: 60-69

Take it or leave it! Essentially, that is the message of today’s First Reading and Gospel. The Israelites, the disciples, and we, are presented with a stark choice. There is no leeway, no compromise, no ifs or buts. Either we are for God, or we are against Him: either we accept Jesus’ words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, without attempting to explain them away, or we cannot count ourselves among His disciples.

The Israelites, after wandering in the desert, have finally reached the Promised Land; and Joshua, who has become their leader following the death of Moses, presents them with alternatives. Either they can follow pagan gods, or they can become disciples of the one true God: they cannot do both.

Joshua gives them what is effectively an ultimatum because, after repeatedly grumbling throughout their time in the wilderness, they have now become careless in their adherence to the one God. Immediately, the people declare their allegiance to God, but their commitment would prove to be fragile, and through the centuries there would be repeated instances of backsliding.

It is fairly clear how this situation is repeated in our world today. People have discovered a whole range of alternative gods, in the forms of comfort, material prosperity, and a sort of superstitious scientism, which deifies science in a way which sensible, rational scientists avoid.

That is the easy, comforting explanation of Joshua’s question as it is posed today. It is too easy, too comforting. It is easy and comforting for us to claim that we have made our choice and avoided those traps.

What, though, of the other traps? What about the trap of grumbling, which was the beginning of the Israelites’ rebellion? I am not suggesting that we should all become Pollyannas, finding everything wonderful and denying reality, joining the ranks of the “Smile, Jesus loves you” brigade. That sort of relentless cheerfulness can be as destructive as its opposite, as GK Chesterton points out in the Fr. Brown story “The Three Tools of Death”.

Yet, if we are honest, we may well discover that we are in danger of falling into a negative mindset. This can quickly develop into an inability to see goodness anywhere, and can lead to effectively denying the goodness of God.

Further, is our commitment to God as genuine as it seems, or is it focused on a god of our own creation, whose ideas conveniently match our own? Do we really worship and serve God, or are we devotees of our own way of seeing and doing things, our own fixed ideas of morality (especially sexual morality) our own preferred style and mood of worship? I still recall the warning of the late Mgr. McReavy, delivered at my first, breathtaking Easter Vigil in the seminary, that liturgy can become an end in itself, “whether it be trad liturgy or pop, folksy or dignified”.

As Joshua faces the Israelites (and us) with a choice, so does Jesus face His disciples (and us). Are we prepared to accept His claim to be the Bread of Life, His instruction to eat His flesh and drink His blood? Some of His followers are not, and His reaction to them is fascinating. He doesn’t say “Whoa! Hang on a minute! You haven’t understood. What I really mean is....” He lets them go with the Parthian shot that they lack the spirit (or more accurately “the Spirit”) to accept Him. Furthermore, He compels the Twelve, His chosen inner circle, to answer the same question. They too must say “Yea” or “Nay”. They too must decide.

If the Twelve had decided to leave, what would that have meant for Jesus’ mission, for salvation history? We shall never know, because Peter, the chosen leader, speaks for them all, and commits them to faith and to following. He would have had no more idea than the leavers what Jesus’ words meant—they would have conveyed nothing until the Last Supper, and those new words spoken over the bread and wine—but he is prepared to entrust himself, and the Church, entirely to Jesus. What about us?

Assumption

Assumption of Our Lady 2021

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

If Fr. Val Farrell, now resident at Nazareth House, were to receive royalties for all the occasions on which I have used a phrase which he passed on to me some forty years ago, he would be a rich man. The phrase, describing Our Lady, is “the eschatological ikon of the Church”.

Mary is the eschatological ikon of the Church as I have by now informed you probably more often than you have had hot dinners. This means, as you may now be tired of hearing, that Mary IS what the Church is called to be: she is what you and I are called to be, what we shall be in eternity, and what the Church, at her best, already is, at least in embryo.

Let us consider how this works. The most ancient title of Our Lady, apart from those given to her in the scriptures, is THEOTOKOS, God Bearer, Mother of God. This title was defined by the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. How, you may ask, can it apply to us?

We, as the Church, and as individuals, are called to be mothers of God today, bringing God, in the person of Jesus Christ, into today’s world, making Him present to the world by our words and actions. Mary is Mother of God not only physically, but especially spiritually, enabling Him to be a presence in and for the world: physically, we cannot do the same, but spiritually we can and must.

Many more examples can be drawn from today’s Gospel, of the Visitation. Firstly, Mary is seen as the woman of compassion, setting out to care for her elderly cousin in her pregnancy. Secondly, she is the woman who brings Christ to others, fulfilling her role as Mother of God spiritually, as He makes His presence known to Elizabeth and to her unborn son. Thirdly, she is the woman filled with the Spirit, as she enables others to be filled with the Spirit, as are John who leaps in the womb, and Elizabeth who prophesies. Are not all of these qualities to be looked for in the Church?

Mary goes on to reveal herself as the woman of prayer and praise, as she declaims the Magnificat, a prayer which the Church utters daily at Evening Prayer, or Vespers, and the Anglican Communion at Evensong. In that prayer, she exults in the saving works of God, she rejoices in her own lowliness, and she recognises both the holiness of God and the marvels which He has worked for and in her.

She then goes on to praise the compassion of God, and to encourage us to imitate Him in His preference for the poor and the downtrodden, in words which will find an echo in her Son’s Beatitudes. It is small wonder that the Magnificat has become a rallying cry among those working for justice in Latin America.

Perhaps most significant for today’s feast are Elizabeth’s words “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”. Mary is the woman of faith, as the Church must be a people of faith, and we must be men and women of faith. This faith is the source of Mary’s blessedness, which she herself asserts will be proclaimed throughout the generations.

The Church’s definition of the Assumption of Mary as a doctrine, is an assertion of the Church’s faith in God’s promise to the Church. St. Paul reminds the Christians of Corinth that “all people will be brought to life in Christ, but all of them in their proper order”. As the Preface of today’s Mass points out, the Assumption of Our Lady makes her once again the eschatological ikon of the Church, because she is “the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its fulfilment”.

Mary is received body and soul into heaven. She is the Ark of the Covenant as the dwelling place of God: she is the woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon and crowned with the stars; but so is the Church. She has been taken to her fulfilment as the first of the redeemed: we are to follow. In the meantime, we must take to heart the words of the Magnificat, and “all generations will call (her) blessed”.

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”.