Low Sunday

2nd Sunday of Easter 2022

Acts 5:12-16; Apocalypse 1: 9-13, 17-19; John 20:19-31

I sometimes think that the compilers of the Lectionary (the book containing the Mass readings) like to confuse us. They give us, on the Second Sunday of Easter, a First Reading which relates to the aftermath of Pentecost, and a Gospel, relating to today, which will be partly repeated at Pentecost.

It is the latter which causes mayhem, because, when it comes to Pentecost, people fail to realise that the Gospel is speaking about last Sunday (and today) and they fall into the trap of claiming that the disciples were cowering in fear at Pentecost, whereas, they were waiting in prayer, as they had been told, for the coming of the Holy Spirit. So when you hear the first part of this Gospel passage at Pentecost, PLEASE remember that you first heard it TODAY.

Right then, let’s see what the implications are. On Easter Sunday evening, the disciples ARE in fear behind locked doors. Can you blame them? Admittedly, Our Lord had told them that He would suffer, die, and rise, but they had no experience of the third part of the equation. They understood suffering, they understood death, but resurrection was beyond their comprehension. They assumed that, having killed Jesus, the authorities would now proceed to round up His followers. No wonder they hid.

Today, so many people are living in fear. People in Ukraine fear the rockets and bombs which may rain down upon them, or the invading troops who will break down their doors, beat up the men, rape the women, then probably shoot them. Lawyers and journalists in Hong Kong fear the knock on the door which will herald their “detention”. Families in Northern Nigeria fear a raid from Boko Haram, to kill the adults and kidnap the children. Women in this country fear the return home of an abusive husband or partner; while whole families, devastated by the escalating cost of living crisis, await anxiously the arrival of the bailiff to take away what little they have.

Lord, change the hearts of the violent and the cruel. Give to those in authority a spirit of compassion. Banish fear through your power as the Risen Christ by taking away the causes of fear.

The risen Christ stands among those fear-filled disciples. He wishes them peace, and He shows them His wounds. He gives them a mission and the power to forgive sins, and He breathes the Holy Spirit into them (which is why this passage is read at Pentecost).

If they had been firm in their belief that Jesus would rise from the dead, would they also have expected Him still to bear His wounds? I am inclined to think that they would have expected the scars to vanish. That they do not vanish is hugely important. The risen Christ is the wounded Christ. He has come to His resurrection by way of His wounds, and He calls us to resurrection by the same route.

Not only Christ’s wounds, but also our wounds are important. Christ’s wounds redeem us: our wounds, insofar as they are united with His, remake us, give us compassion, enable us to extend the healing of Christ to others. Wounds may damage us, but they may also strengthen us, give us new insight and new life, as the wounds of Jesus were the basis of His new life as the risen Christ.

Finally, what do we make of Thomas? We call him “doubting Thomas”: perhaps we should rather call him “inquiring Thomas”. He reminds us, as did his later namesake labelled Aquinas, that faith and reason work together. We are every bit as rational as any of today’s self-styled rationalists. We do not believe in fairy tales: we demand validation of our beliefs. In fact, we are more rational than the “rationalists”, because, like Thomas, we have the gumption to realise that reason can take us only so far, that there are things beyond our reasoning and our comprehension.

Consequently, we can reasonably go beyond reason to faith, and to say, with Thomas, “My Lord and my God”. Touch reveals the wounds to Thomas: reason and faith take him behind the wounds to recognise God. May it always be so for us.

5th Sunday of Lent Year C

5th Sunday of Lent 2022

Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

What do you think? Is today’s society tolerant or intolerant? I could add another question—which condition would be preferable?—but I will leave that to one side.

My own view is that it is very much a mixed bag. In many ways, Britain is a far more tolerant country, both for better and for worse, than it was a generation ago; yet it is also, in subtle and sometimes hidden ways, deeply intolerant.

I think that there is a deeper tolerance between the generations. Those of you who grew up in the 50s and 60s may recall the bitter loathing—the only word I can use—with which adults tended to view the musical taste of the rising generation. I suspect that this was rooted in a fear of the rebelliousness or even anarchy which sometimes appeared to accompany rock or pop music, but it could be quite visceral. There were comedians who based their acts in expressions of contempt for the whole culture of popular music, and I recall tabloid headlines when it was revealed that one rising young group didn’t play its own instruments, but made use of session musicians. This was seen as a dreadful scandal, a proof that everything about 60s youth was corrupt and dishonest.

Now, the teenagers of the 60s are the oldies of today; their music is mainstream, and their view of their successors is tempered by their own experience of being demonised. There is an element of crossover between classical and popular music, with orchestras providing background for rock groups, an indication of a lessening of inter-generational intolerance.

Racial intolerance is less obvious than it was fifty years ago, at least in part because of changes in the law—the inflammatory rhetoric of an Enoch Powell, or the “no blacks or Irish” posters in boarding house windows, would now fall foul of the law—but there is no doubt that racism still exists. I wonder whether Ms. Zighari-Radcliffe would have encountered the same torrent of vitriol for daring to criticise successive Home Secretaries, at least two of whom have publicly accepted the validity of her complaints, had her skin been a few shades lighter.

In sexual matters, there is a tolerance which could not have been imagined in the allegedly swinging 60s, yet it is accompanied by a total intolerance of anything which deviates from the prevailing fashion. I haven’t followed closely the issue of JK Rowling’s comments, but I find the venom with which she has been attacked deeply disturbing, and the enthusiasm with which “celebrities” leap onto the bandwagon to snipe at her, downright cowardly.

So was Jesus tolerant or intolerant? Today’s Gospel shows a response to the woman taken in adultery which goes far deeper than either tolerance or intolerance: it is rooted in compassion.

His opponents saw an opportunity to bind Him in a Catch 22 situation. If He approved the stoning of the woman, they could accuse Him of brutality: if He opposed it, He would be rejecting the teaching of Moses. Effectively they are asking “Are you tolerant or intolerant?” Either answer would condemn Him.

Jesus’ response amounts to sheer genius, as He both upholds the moral law, and deals compassionately with the individual, while at the same time revealing to His interlocutors the extent of their own hypocrisy. His silent absorption in His writing—what WAS He writing?—avoids a rush into conflict, something from which we might learn.

Then, He turns the accusers’ questions back on themselves, inviting—indeed, forcing—them to examine their own hearts and their own motivation, something which we ourselves should do before rushing to express ourselves in terms of tolerance or intolerance.

Finally, with His opponents routed, Jesus focuses His attention wholly on the woman, seeing her as a human being, not as a case to be judged. “Has no one condemned you? Neither do I.” These are words which should stagger us by their compassion, but we must not ignore Our Lord’s final command: “Do not sin any more”.

Neither tolerance nor intolerance is really the issue. There is a moral law to be upheld, but transgressors are to be led to repentance, not by pointed fingers and hurled brickbats, but by love, compassion, and a recognition of our own fallibility.

4th Sunday Lent Year C

4th Sunday of Lent 2022

Joshua 5:9-12; 2Cor 5:17-21; Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

I have been doing my sums, and have worked out that it is 51 years since I heard the Late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP preach on “A New Creation”: that is seventeen cycles of three years each of liturgical readings.

Fr. McCabe’s homily (or “conference” as they were known at Fisher House) made a deep impression on me. He was elaborating on St. Paul’s words which we have just heard from the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation”.

Ponder that for a moment. If we belong to Christ, the whole world is made new for us. It is a positive place, a place re-created in Christ, reconciled by Him to its Creator, God the Father.

That word “reconciled” is fascinating. The Greek word is katallasso and Paul uses it, or the noun katallage (reconciliation) five times in a very short passage. Five times, St. Paul points out that the incarnation, suffering and death of Jesus the Son of God have reconciled the world to God; have undone the damage caused by human sin; and have thus created the world anew, if only we have eyes to see, hearts to accept.

As you know, “Reconciliation” is now the official title of the Sacrament of Penance, or Confession, and the great twentieth century English Catholic writer GK Chesterton experienced the New Creation precisely in the context of that sacrament. In his Autobiography, published in 1936, he wrote “When a Catholic comes from Confession he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning....He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man....He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old”.

Chesterton had captured the essence of the sacrament, which is a renewal of that New Creation which is ours by virtue of our belonging to Christ. As a convert, he experienced Confession first as an adult, and I would maintain that it is an adult sacrament. I hope that I won’t be burned as a heretic for saying this, but I have come to believe that it is a pity that children make their First Confession. I say that for two reasons: firstly because, in today’s world, it is, as often as not, their last confession, as they make no further use of the sacrament: secondly because so many, though by no means all, of those who have continued with the practice of confession, have continued with their first confession all through their lives, presenting their shopping list of peccadilloes, never coming to an adult grasp of the wonders of the sacrament. What, I have wondered more than once, does it mean when an elderly person comes to me and confesses to having been disobedient?

I am heading off at a tangent here, but I believe that Reconciliation, and not Confirmation, should be the sacrament of the teenage years. The current practice of administering Confirmation to adolescents comes perilously close at times to heresy, in the form of Pelagianism. Confirmation is a sacrament of Initiation, and should be administered with baptism, whether to adults or to babies.

It was my experience at the Diocesan Youth Centre which persuaded me that First Confession is for teenagers. On a Wednesday evening at Castlerigg we would have a Reconciliation Service, after which I would go into “the box”, and would often be swamped by the number of confessions. I remember one course, during which the 15/16 year old participants kept me occupied till midnight with individual, and very mature, confessions. The following evening, there were requests for confessions again, and it was one am before I emerged from the confessional box, frozen to the marrow because the heating had long switched itself off. Those teenagers had shared GK Chesterton’s experience: they had encountered the New Creation.

“Hang on!” I hear you cry, “What about the Prodigal Son?” The parable ties in with St. Paul, who writes “For our sake, God made the One who did not know sin (in other words, Jesus) into sin”. God actually made Jesus into the Prodigal Son, returning to the Father carrying the sins of all the world, and effectively dumping them. Consequently, Father and Son, and the whole of creation, a creation now made new, could celebrate in enjoyment of the new dawn of the world.

3rd Sunday of Lent Year C

3rd Sunday of Lent 2022

Exodus 3:1-8; 1Cor 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

Some years ago, I surprised a burglar in the presbytery at Holy Family, Morecambe. Come to that, he surprised me. You don’t expect to walk into your house in the middle of the afternoon, and find it being burgled. We had the briefest and most bizarre conversation.

“What the h**l are you doing here?” I exclaimed.

“Breaking in” came the reply, which at least had the virtue of being honest. Then he pushed past me, and ran off across the car park and down the road. I dialled 999.

Now if I had been able to give the police an accurate description of the man, it would have been helpful. I didn’t, because I had a far more powerful tool at my disposal: I knew his name. He was one of the regulars, constantly knocking at the door with increasingly elaborate and far-fetched stories as an attempt to gain money.

Consequently I said “A bloke called Such-and-such has just broken into my house, and is now running down Westgate. Would you like me to give you his address?” to which the reply came “No, we know his address. We will send someone to his flat to wait for him to come back.”

The ancients believed that, to know someone’s name, gave you power over them. That incident proved that they were correct. Ironically, in homilies, I had twice used the example of an imaginary burglar breaking into a house where the householder knew his name, to illustrate the point, though I never imagined that such a scenario would play out in reality.

This is the point of God’s self revelation to Moses at the burning bush. Moses wants to know God’s name, in order that the Israelites may worship Him as their own tribal god, just as the other nations worship their tribal gods—but God will have none of it. He doesn’t have a name because, unlike the tribal gods of the nations, He exists, and He cannot be controlled, as their names would allow them to be controlled, if they existed.

The God of the burning bush is the one true God, self sufficient, pure existence, beyond the reach of any name. “I AM WHO AM” He replies: “I AM the one who exist, who have no name, over whom no one has power”.

That is why it was nonsensical when the custom arose in the 70s, and which has now been forbidden by the Church, of translating the non-name of God as Yahweh, thus doing precisely what God refused to do. To give God a name, to call Him Yahweh, is to reduce the true God to the level of the non-existent tribal gods: no wonder the Church forbade its use.

But here’s the rub. In the fullness of time, God gave Himself a name, and so gave people power over Him. That name is Jesus, a name which, says the Letter to the Philippians, is above all names and every knee shall bow to it; yet it is also a name which gave human beings power over God, to do with Him as they wished, to mock and scourge Him, and to kill Him as a criminal.

Thus did God, in the person of Jesus, prove the old adage that to know someone’s name is to have power over them; but in today’s Gospel, he rejects another ancient belief, namely that suffering is punishment for sin. Those victims about whom we hear were not, Jesus maintains, being punished for their sins.

Bizarrely, however, that belief persists today. People will talk eagerly about karma, the belief that “what goes around, comes around”, that bad people will get their come-uppance. On the reverse side of the coin, people who are suffering, or who believe that they are—a more usual situation—will plead “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this” or “Why me?”

Suffering happens. I would never be glib about it, yet it often seems to be the case that people who are genuinely suffering deeply are more likely to be philosophical about it, and, if they have faith, to recognise it as a share in the sufferings of Jesus, the God who accepted a name so as to become compassionate with us, to give us the means and the power of approaching Him, and to be the healer of all our wounds because He has Himself been wounded.

2nd Sunday of Lent Year C

2nd Sunday of Lent 2022

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 9: 28-36

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but whatever the Gospel readings may be on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent, the themes for the first and second Sundays are unvarying. The First Sunday always tells us of Jesus’ time in the wilderness, to which He was led by the Spirit, and in which He fasted and was tempted; the Second Sunday always describes the Transfiguration. The authors are changed according to a three year cycle, but the subject matter is not.

It is easy to understand why the wilderness and the temptations are there, as they set the pattern for our own Lenten journey, but why the Transfiguration? There is a clue in the identity of the disciples who witnessed the event.

These are Peter, James and John. Where else do we encounter them as a threesome? It is in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, you may recall, they are separated from the rest and taken forward to be the close witnesses of Jesus’ Agony. What is the connection? It seems reasonable to suppose that they were given the vision of the Transfiguration to prepare them for the ordeal of Gethsemane: that Jesus hoped that the foretaste of His glory revealed at Mount Tabor would sustain them through this new and contrasting vision in which He cried aloud to the Father and His sweat fell like gouts of blood.

If that was Our Lord’s intention, is it fair to say that it failed? The mention of sleep provides a link. At the Transfiguration, Luke tells us, the disciples were heavy with sleep, but they stayed awake: in Gethsemane, sleep overcame them, because the experience was too much to bear. Even the recollection of what they had seen on the mountain wasn’t sufficient to uphold them in the time of trial. The memory and the promise of glory could not carry them through the present experience of agony.

As always, we have to ask ourselves “How does this relate to us?” We too have our Transfiguration moments, those times when we are filled with joy, when God seems very close to us, when the promise of future glory is thoroughly credible. We also have our Gethsemane times, when anguish threatens to overwhelm us, when God seems far away, when His promises may feel like pie in the sky.

Do the Transfiguration times carry us through their opposite? When we are in Gethsemane, do we remember Mt. Tabor, when the promise of resurrection, of final victory lifted our hearts? If not, we should not despair—the same thing happened to Peter, James, and John—and yet we do need to call to mind those times of promise, those experiences of the closeness of God, and to look beyond present agony to the reality of resurrection. If our hearts have failed, we need to lift them up again, as we claim that we do in every celebration of Mass in the preface dialogue as we approach the Eucharistic Prayer.

It is important to remember too that any experience we have of the presence of God is always likely to be a matter of both light and shade. One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is variously described as “fear of the Lord” and as “wonder and awe”. When the disciples on Mt. Tabor are covered by the cloud, which indicates the presence of God as it had done for the Israelites during their wilderness journey, they are afraid. God is a loving and generous God, but He IS God, beyond our comprehension, not to be trifled with.

At such times, we may even share the experience of Abraham, who witnessed the presence of God under the signs of the smoking furnace and the firebrand. Like the Gethsemane disciples, Abraham takes refuge in sleep, and terror seizes him. That terror is the prelude to God’s gift of a covenant. In every Mass, God’s covenant is renewed with us in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, transformed into the very essence of the Son of God. We do not, I trust, seek refuge in sleep, but we should be seized by awe, as we witness something greater than Abraham’s vision, greater even than the Transfiguration, as the Son of the Father, the Chosen One, becomes present for us as our food. Every Mass should be a Transfiguration moment for us, to sustain us during our own Gethsemane times.

1st Sunday of Lent Year C

1st Sunday of Lent 2022

Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4: 1-13

Many many moons ago, I was celebrating the early Mass on the First Sunday of Lent in St. Mary’s, Morecambe, and I posed the rhetorical question “How is Lent going?” To my surprise, a middle aged voice answered from the congregation: “Grand!”

That in itself was grand. If Lent is going well for you, that is a good thing: if you are finding it a struggle, that is good too. If you are not aware of it, if it is having no effect, that is bad; because it is a particularly important time in the year, and in life, and it should be affecting us in one way or another.

Lent is a season of preparation.” Of preparation for what?” you may ask: for Easter certainly, but perhaps more importantly, for the rest of your life, for death, for eternity. Just as, in Advent, we should not rush too quickly to the crib, so in Lent we mustn’t dash yet to the Garden, the Cross, and certainly not to the empty tomb. There is still much work for God to carry out in us before we sing the Hosannas of Palm Sunday.

We are on a journey. The journey of Lent is a microcosm of the journey of life. In Lent, as in life, we have a goal, while at the same time we are recognising the struggles, the opportunities, the sorrows, and the joys of every day. Nor do we make this journey alone. We tread it in company not only with all our brothers and sisters who are alive today throughout the world, but with all who have made that same journey before us.

First among these are our elder brothers and sisters of Israel. As the First Reading reminded us, the Jewish people were commanded to recall the saving work of God among them: their entry into Egypt and their subsequent enslavement, their Exodus from Egypt, and their wilderness journey to the Promised Land.

We are making that journey with them, throughout our lives, and with particular emphasis in Lent. We too have escaped from slavery--in our case, through our baptism—and we too are journeying through the wilderness to the Promised Land. In that wilderness journey, we, like our forefathers of Israel, encounter temptations, failures, setbacks; but we are aware that, like them we are accompanied by God in the pillar and the cloud, the pillar of fire which lights our way, and the cloud of unknowing which hides God from us, but through which we must pass on our journey with and to Him.

From today’s Gospel we see that our Lenten journey and our life’s journey take us through another wilderness, the forty day wilderness of Jesus, which was the immediate postscript to His baptism, and the prelude to His public ministry.  Notice that it was the Holy Spirit which led Him into and through the wilderness—Mark, in his Gospel, tells us that the Spirit DROVE Jesus into the wilderness—and it is that same Holy Spirit which leads us into and through the wildernesses of Lent and of life. Incidentally, it strikes me that Lent often brings its own wilderness experiences, regardless of the voluntary penances which we undertake, times of difficulty and struggle which were not part of our personal plan.

Those voluntary penances, however, need to be there. On Ash Wednesday, we heard Jesus say, not “IF you give, IF you pray, IF you fast” but “WHEN you give, WHEN you pray, WHEN you fast”: the manner of these practices is voluntary, the use of them is not.

Often, the fasting element is played down, which I think is a mistake. We are told that we should fast from sin, and that we should do something positive. Of course we should, but that does not take away either Jesus’ words “when you fast”, or His actions, when He fasted during His own wilderness journey. Self denial is every bit as much a part of our wilderness journey as are giving and prayer.

How is Lent going? Ask yourself that question now, and if the answer is that it is making no difference, then shape yourself!

8th Sunday Year C

8th Sunday in Ordinary time 2022

Sirach 27: 4-7; 1 Cor 15:54-58; Luke 6: 39-45

“Can one blind man guide another?” But who are the blind? There is a saying that “There are none so blind as those who will not see” and you and I would probably go along with that.

We, of course, can see everything clearly: it is other people who are blind. Why on earth do they not have the vision to see things as we see them, whether in matters of religion, ethics, politics, sport, or whatever? How can referees be so blind as to fail to see blatant fouls against my team? How can umpires be so blind as to turn down obvious LBW appeals? There are so many blind people around: thank  goodness you and I can see.

Our Lord warns us today against this attitude of superiority. He calls us “disciples” and a disciple is one who is always learning, and who always needs to learn. The root of the word is the Latin verb discere, meaning “to learn”. The Greek word for “disciple” is “mathetes”, from which comes “mathematics”: I am glad we have more important things than maths to learn.

And that learning is a lifelong process. Returning to the ancient Greeks, we may recall their saying “I grow old, always learning” or, as we put it, “you are never too old to learn”. Indeed, we MUST never be too old to learn the things of God. Our daily prayer must always involve an openness to God, allowing Him to speak in the depths of our being, opening the scriptures to us, revealing the mysteries of the Kingdom, guiding us along the path which He has marked out for us.

What is true for us as individuals is equally true for the Church, which must never be a static entity, immoveable, its face firmly turned to the past. Of course the Church must always learn from the past, must be true to what has been handed down—the real meaning of “tradition”. But tradition is a living thing, the work of a living Church. It should not be, cannot be, the clinging to a certain moment or era of our past, but involves a continuity and a growth. St. John Henry Newman wrote a famous essay “On the Development of Doctrine”, and the Second Vatican Council spoke of the Church as “the pilgrim people of God”.

Doctrine is developing because we are disciples, always learning from the past, but learning new insights under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As disciples, we are always on pilgrimage within the Kingdom and towards the fullness of the Kingdom. We would be blind indeed if we were to plant our feet firmly in one moment of history, refusing to advance any further along our pilgrim way, as those have done who, over the centuries, have rejected the teaching of successive Councils of the Church, including the Second Vatican Council.

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Our Lord encourages us to be like wise householders, who take from our store things both old and new. But we must be careful to do this always as disciples, as people who learn, who are conscious that we do not have all the answers, that we have our own share of blindness.

Hence, Jesus gives us the warning not to be presumptuous, not to think that we know it all. We do still have planks in our eyes, whether these be our lack of knowledge, or our own particular prejudices, which should make us hesitant to attempt to correct others, whose own splinters may be tiny in comparison with our own handicaps to understanding. This puts me in mind of the more fanatical evangelicals, who will attempt to “convert” Catholics, blissfully unaware of the limits of their own understanding arising from a blinkered reading of the scriptures, set against the accumulated discipleship of the Church in the course of two thousand years.

Always, we must retain that attitude of discipleship, so that, when we do speak, our words will be, as both Jesus and the author of the First Reading demand, an expression of goodness and a fruitful gift to our hearers.

7th Sunday Year C

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

1 Samuel 26:7-23; Psalm 102; 1 Cor 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38

Many, many moons ago, when I was based at the Diocesan Residential Youth Centre, the lay members of staff used to claim, tongue in cheek (at least, I think it was tongue in cheek) that I had only one homily, which went “compassion—cum passio—suffering with”. A few years later, on my first Sunday in St. Gregory’s, Preston, having spotted one of those former staff members in the congregation, I felt compelled to begin my homily by saying “There is someone in church who believes that I have only one homily. I am now going to prove them right”, because the Gospel on that day cried out for that selfsame homily, as does today’s Gospel.

“Be compassionate, as your Father is compassionate” we are instructed by Jesus. In one sense, the Psalm goes even further, stating not simply that God is compassionate, but that He is COMPASSION—that compassion is an aspect of His very nature.

How can this be? The Psalmist wouldn’t have known it, but God was to reveal Himself as COMPASSION, by becoming one of us in the person of Jesus, thus taking our human nature as His own, undergoing what we undergo, suffering what we suffer. Compassion is one of God’s greatest gifts to us because it is a sharing in His nature, a sharing bestowed on us in the Incarnation, the taking by God of our human nature, with all that this entails.

Sometimes the word “compassion” is devalued by being taken to mean “feeling sorry for”, but it is a far deeper reality than that. The same is true of the Greek equivalent “sun pathos” which comes into English as “sympathy” a word which also means “suffering with”, but which is generally reduced to that same concept of “feeling sorry for”—something experienced from outside. Hence, it is usually replaced, when we wish to express that sense of “suffering with”, by “empathy” (en pathos) literally “suffering in”.

That is the feeling, and the attitude, which Jesus demands of us. We must put ourselves in the other person’s skin, experience things from his/her point of view, as God, in the person of Jesus, put Himself in our skin, experiencing things from our point of view. If we have an enemy, we must walk in that enemy’s shoes, seeing things, as best we can, from that enemy’s viewpoint, not primarily to give ourselves a strategic advantage, but to understand why they behave as they do, what aspect of our common humanity is driving them.

Can a Ukrainian, indeed can we, be compassionate with Vladimir Putin, take on his skin, his mind, his soul? Can a Northern Ireland nationalist do the same for a committed unionist, and vice versa? This may seem to demand the impossible, yet it is the demand made of us by Jesus, the compassionate God, when He tells us uncompromisingly “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly”. It is a demand which He Himself embodied to the full when He prayed “Father, forgive them,” on behalf of those apparently evil men who were crucifying Him. When He added “for they know not what they do”, Jesus demonstrated that He had entered into their mindset, understood what made them tick, become compassionate with them.

Such an attitude, such a response, is profoundly counter-cultural. You need only skim the internet, or glance at newspaper headlines, to note the venom spewed by so many on those with whom they disagree. If you were to visit certain self-styled Catholic media outlets—which I don’t advise you to do—you would be horrified by the hatred which some of them express for the Holy Father. “No compassion there” you might say, and you would be correct, but here’s the rub: you and I must be compassionate with them, must enter into their minds and hearts to understand what drives them, must do good to them, bless them, pray for them. Is this the most difficult Gospel passage of all? Possibly. Are we obliged to take it seriously? Definitely. Is compassion the most demanding of mindsets? It may be, but it is certainly the most Christ-like, and so, ultimately, the most rewarding.

6th Sunday Year C

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1; 1 Cor 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26

St Luke, as anyone on the number 51 into Carnforth will tell you, is known as the scriba mansuetudinis Christi, “the one who writes of the gentleness of Christ”. If you continue further, on the number 55 to Lancaster, you may find those who will inform you that it was Dante who coined that expression: whether that is true or not I must rely on you to confirm or deny.

Therefore, when St. Luke of all people depicts Our Lord as speaking harshly, we must sit up and take notice. Today, in the Sermon on the Plain, Luke records Jesus delivering a starker version of the Beatitudes than we find in Matthew, and following it up with a corresponding list of woes.

Thus, whereas Matthew describes Jesus speaking of the blessedness of the poor in spirit, according to Luke it is the poor who are said to be blessed, without the addition of the spiritual element. For Matthew, the blessing comes upon those who hunger and thirst for justice, whilst Luke has Our Lord say simply “Blessed are you who hunger now”, seemingly implying a physical, rather than a spiritual hunger. Similarly, Luke is alone in lamenting the prospects of the rich, the well fed, the contented and the popular—those, indeed, whose needs are being satisfied by earthly things.

What are we to make of this? At one level, the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel is confirming the prophecies of Jeremiah and of the first Psalm. He is distinguishing those whose interests and trust are rooted in material things, and who are doomed to disappointment, from those who put their trust in God, and who, as both Jeremiah and the Psalmist declare, are like a tree whose roots reach down to the stream, relying on the ultimately reliable.

So far, so good, we may think. WE put our trust in God: we are all right Jack. But is it really as straightforward as that?

In blessing the poor and the hungry, and warning the rich and the comfortable, Our Lord is shattering any tendency that we may have towards complacency. Very few of us, I suspect, can genuinely claim to be poor, or to go hungry; yet poverty and hunger exist in our world, and even in our own country.

Nor are that poverty and that hunger inevitably people’s own fault, as some would claim. Yes, there are those who have squandered what they had, or who have pursued pleasure to the point of addiction, but that is far from being the whole story. It is very easy for people to lose their homes through redundancy, or marriage breakdown, or sudden illness. Thank God (and Aneurin Bevan) for the National Health Service, which ensures that we shall not be bankrupted by medical bills, as can be the case in poorer, or even in wealthy but less civilised nations, but the loss of income entailed in lengthy illness can have devastating effects.

Furthermore, how many of the homeless have a military background, people whom we were happy to laud as they preserved our security, but whom we ignore when they return, traumatised by their service?

The poor, the hungry, the distressed, are very much part of today’s world, as they were in the days of Our Lord; and, as this Gospel makes clear, we ignore them at our peril. It is not enough to claim that we, at least, have our priorities right: that we put our trust in God, and not in the things of earth, in material well-being. In many ways, we HAVE that material well-being. If we do not put it at the service of others; if we ignore our suffering brothers and sisters; worse still, if we join the chorus of those who point the finger and declare that it is their own fault, then far from being blessed, we shall hear those words “Alas for you” directed at us.

Lent is looming: it is two and a half weeks away. At the very least, let us commit ourselves to some contribution to the relief of the poor, making that a starting point.

5th Sunday Year C

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Cor 15: 1-11; Luke 5:1-11

There can be scarcely anyone on planet Earth who is not aware that Meat Loaf died a few weeks ago, as it was plastered across all the communications media. Even the Queen’s guard took note: at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, “I’d do anything for love (but I won’t do that)” formed part of the band’s repertoire. Had Christopher Robin been still alive, he would no doubt have gone down with Alice for it.

I owe Meat Loaf a particular debt of gratitude as, for the past thirty nine years, I have used the closing lines of “Bat out of hell” in Reconciliation Services, in association with today’s First Reading and Gospel. (Incidentally, some months ago I also decided that I would save that particular song from the waves in the unlikely event of my being cast away to a desert island.)

You probably don’t need me to remind you that the closing lines of “Bat out of hell” are “Like a sinner before the gates of heaven, I’ll come crawling on back to you”, and I quote them in Services of Reconciliation in order to point out that they are the exact opposite of the way that God’s mercy, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation work. Today’s Mass Readings illustrate and reinforce the point.

Isaiah’s vision provides us with a perfect template for Reconciliation/Penance/Confession and its aftermath. Isaiah encounters the majesty of God in the Temple, and all his senses are assailed. He is overwhelmed by the sight of God enthroned, surrounded by the six-winged seraphs. Their song thunders in his ears, as the foundations of the Temple are shaken, and he inhales the smoking incense. Shortly, he will feel and taste the burning coal, having used his voice to express his unworthiness.

How is Isaiah’s unworthiness revealed to him? It is not by introspection, by delving into the lumber rooms of his conscience in an attempt to unearth every single sin or peccadillo of which he may, or may not, have been guilty: rather it is by looking outward, gazing upon the majesty of God, and recognising God’s greatness and goodness, which show up his own sinfulness by contrast.

There are echoes here of the old “long” Act of Contrition, which many of you will have learnt as children, and which declares as our chief reason for sorrow that our sins “offend thine infinite goodness”. In other words, we, like Isaiah, look towards God, rather than into ourselves, and recognise God as both awesome and loving, and therefore as deserving better of us.

Gazing at God, and recognising God’s greatness, Isaiah makes his confession, and receives absolution, as the seraph uses the burning coal to purge his sinful lips, the gateway to his sinful heart. Then, having been healed of his sin, Isaiah is given a mission, to be the Lord’s messenger, as we are sent out from Confession to be messengers for God, to fulfil our baptismal role as prophets.

Our Lord’s encounter with the fishermen shows the same process at work. Peter and his companions are brought to an awareness of their sinfulness, again not by looking into themselves, but by gazing at Jesus Christ, seeing the miracle which He has worked, and recognising their own inadequacy in the mirror of His majesty.

Like Isaiah, Peter makes his confession: “Leave me Lord, I am a sinful man.” Like Isaiah, he receives absolution: “Do not be afraid”. Like Isaiah, he is given a mission: “You will be fishers of men”. (Unfortunately, the play on words—fishermen/fishers of men—works only in English: there is no equivalent in the Greek original.)

As with Isaiah and Peter, so it is with us. We gaze at the love, the mercy, the majesty of God, and so are brought to recognise our own unworthiness. We receive absolution, and we are given a mission. Where, then, does Meat Loaf come in?

Well, that is the point: he doesn’t. His image of the crawling sinner is the opposite of the reality, and yet it is the image so many people seem to have of this sacrament. “Bat out of hell” is bad theology—but, by heck, it is a cracking good song!

4th Sunday Year C

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

Jeremiah 1`:4-5, 17-19; 1Cor 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30.

The compilers of the Lectionary (the book of readings) can be irritating at times in the way that they edit passages from the Scriptures, and, in particular, in the choice of verses which they omit. Today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah skips twelve verses from the middle. In some cases this is understandable, as the verses in question deviate from the principal theme of the call of the young prophet, but it is galling to be deprived of verses 6-8, in which we hear of Jeremiah’s reluctance and anxieties.

These verses read: “I said ‘Ah Lord look. I do not know how to speak: I am a child.’ But the Lord replied ‘Do not say “I am a child”. Go now to those to whom I send you, and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to protect you—it is the Lord who speaks.’”

From them we learn that Jeremiah resisted his call to be a prophet, because he foresaw difficulties and opposition, the same opposition which Our Lord encountered in the synagogue at Nazareth. Jesus was rejected because He told the people some home truths, and that rejection extended to violence. Jeremiah too was to encounter violence at the hands of the civil and religious authorities, and his unease proved to be well founded.

What about us, who were anointed at our baptism to be priests, prophets, and kings, as members of the Body of Christ; who are called to be a prophetic people, witnessing to the Gospel and opposing injustice? If we are true to our calling, we shall encounter opposition or, what can be worse, indifference. Nobody is interested in what we have to say, and if they listen at all, they are unlikely to be convinced.

Some twenty years ago, the late Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, commented that we are singing the song of the Lord in a strange land. He was quoting the psalm in which the Jewish exiles in Babylon lamented their condition, asking, in the translation provided by Boney M, now more than forty years ago, “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

In Babylon, the exiles refused to sing those songs, even though their captors requested them. Jeremiah, Jesus, and we do not have that choice. If we are to be true to our baptism, we must sing the Lord’s song. We have to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ by our words, but especially by the manner of our lives and we have to do it in our own country, which has become a strange land, estranged from Christ and from the values of His Kingdom.

Our greatest prophet at the present day is Pope Francis, who determinedly sings the song of the Lord and who, like Jeremiah, and like the Lord Jesus, encounters bitter opposition from his own people. It was Jesus’ co-religionists who, in His own town, rejected Him, and who wished to kill Him, not least for pointing out that pagans such as the widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian had won God’s favour. Likewise, it is not pagans, but members of his own flock, who are vitriolic in their denunciation of Pope Francis for his determination to make the Church more Christ-like, and to bring the compassion of Christ to the world.

So true commitment to Christ, true proclamation and living out of the Gospel, will bring opposition. How are we to cope with that? St. Paul provides the answer in that beautiful passage from his First Letter to the Corinthians. Opposition must be countered and overcome by love. Denunciation, condemnation, demonisation of our opponents are all contrary to the message and person of Christ. All of our cherished schemes and projects, and all of our most persuasive arguments, will, in the end, fall short. Only that love which comes from God, which is developed and grown in us through our relationship with God, and which encompasses even those with whom we disagree fundamentally, will empower us as true prophets, in whatever land we seek to sing the Lord’s song.

3rd Sunday Year C

3rd Sunday in OT 2022

Nehemiah 8:2-6, 8-10; 1 Cor 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

I love that passage from the Book of Nehemiah, describing how Ezra and the scribes read from the Law—the first part of the Hebrew Bible—and interpreted it, all through the morning. Hands up if you can hear the word “Watergate” without thinking of Richard Nixon, and hands up if you are not tempted to think that anyone would be in tears if they had to listen to readings and sermons all morning.

Why were the people in tears? Bear in mind who they were. These were the exiles who had come home to Judah and Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. They were now in that homeland of which they had heard so much from their parents and grandparents, but which they themselves had never seen, having been born in Babylon, where their elders could not even bring themselves to sing the Psalms, so deep was their distress.

Those same elders—parents and grandparents—would have done their best to pass on the faith of Israel to this generation, but inevitably it would have been piecemeal, even times a little garbled. Now this new generation is, at last, learning in full of their ancestral faith, hearing the Scriptures read and explained: no wonder they are overwhelmed.

What about us? What effect do those same Scriptures, and the many more passages which we hear, have on us? Every Sunday, we hear three parts of those Scriptures—actually four, if we include the Psalm. A passage from the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is read to us; we respond with the Psalm, before listening to part of a New Testament Epistle and, finally, the Gospel.

How does it strike us? Are we, like the exiles, moved in the depth of our being? Are we moved to tears, and are they tears of joy, or tears of boredom? I have heard priests, who should know better, being very dismissive of the Old Testament. If they haven’t steeped themselves in the Old Testament and the other readings, if they haven’t struggled to penetrate their meaning so as to convey it to their congregations, how are those congregations to be moved, to have their hearts stirred, to be brought to the verge of tears?

All of us, priests, deacons, religious, members of the congregation, need to have listening ears and listening hearts, attuned to the Word of God which we are hearing. During the Liturgy of the Word, we will bring our ears, our minds, and our hearts into harmony, allowing the Scriptures to seep into us.

A few weeks ago, I saw a cartoon: a family was sitting in church, attending Mass in person after months of following it on line. The husband was whispering to the wife “I don’t half miss being able to fast forward past the homily”. Does the homily lead you more deeply into the word which you have heard? If not, it may be worth going through the readings again, allowing them to take root, taking the Word of God more deeply into ourselves, looking out for the link between the Old Testament reading and the Gospel.

That link can be seen this week, as Jesus follows Ezra in reading from, and then interpreting, God’s Word in the Scriptures. The people are attentive: “all eyes were fixed on Him” we are told. He begins His interpretation by saying “This text is being fulfilled today, even as you listen”.

Those words are as true today, as you listen to them in Claughton, Clitheroe, or Ontario, as they were when Our Lord spoke them in Nazareth. God’s Word is a living word: it speaks to you here and now. Do you have ears to hear, and hearts to welcome and absorb?

2nd Sunday Year C

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

If Holy Mother Church were entirely logical, which in general she sets out to be, I wouldn’t be here in green vestments celebrating the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. Instead, I would be in white vestments celebrating the third stage of the Epiphany.

Epiphany is the showing forth of God the Son become man, and in the early Church it comprised three elements. The first part was the showing forth of Jesus to the Jewish people, represented by Mary, Joseph and the shepherds, as their Messiah; and to the Gentile nations, in the persons of the non-Jewish Wise Men, as the Saviour of the world, Jewish and Gentile alike.

Secondly, as seen in last Sunday’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Epiphany entailed the showing forth of Jesus as the Beloved Son of the Father, through the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Father’s proclamation. Finally, there was His showing forth as God, in the miracle at Cana, where He “let His Glory be seen”, the Glory which, in the Exodus journey of the Jewish people, was the sign of the presence of God; and where He indicated the presence of the Kingdom by providing an abundance of wine, as foretold by the prophets.

For reasons which someone may know, though I do not, the second and third parts of Epiphany became overlooked, surviving only in antiphons of the Roman breviary for the 6th January celebration of the Feast. The Baptism of the Lord was eventually restored after Vatican II as a  separate Feast, with no reference to its original role as the central part of the Epiphany; while the miracle at Cana is described in one year out of three not, as it should be, as part of the Epiphany, but as the Gospel of a Sunday in Ordinary Time. Like a striker missing an open goal, or a fielder squandering a golden opportunity for a run-out, the liturgists (or whoever was responsible) threw away the chance of restoring Epiphany to its original threefold glory.

So what is today about? It is, as I mentioned, a matter of the Shekinah, translated as doxa in Greek, and “Glory” in English, the manifestation of the veiled Godhead which led the Israelites in pillar and cloud to the Promised Land, as Jesus, the presence of God, is to lead humankind to the Kingdom, a Kingdom revealed as present in embryo through the superabundance of wine.

There is something peculiar about this third aspect of Epiphany: it wasn’t due to happen. This is a question of “the Hour” of which Jesus speaks, the time when, in John’s Gospel, He was due to reveal His Glory. This was to happen, as John understood it, in the single event of the crucifixion and resurrection, which was to be Jesus’ glorification by the Father. Until then, His Glory was to be concealed. As He says to His mother, “My Hour has not yet come”.

Yet it does happen. How? At the instigation of that same mother! Some years ago, I read a (Catholic) commentary on this passage which declared rather sternly, “This should not be the occasion of a Marian homily”. Well, all right, insofar as the emphasis should be on the Glory and the Kingdom, but it would be perverse in the extreme to overlook Our Lady’s role, which is extraordinary.

Mary doesn’t actually ask her Son to do anything. She merely points out the situation: “They have no wine”. Jesus struggles against responding, because it is not yet the “Hour”, yet Mary, whom Jesus has addressed as “Woman”, a title which indicates a solemn moment, knows that it is HER “Hour”; that she will prevail.

She may not know exactly what Jesus will do, but she is inspired to recognise that He will do something, and so she says to the servants “Do whatever He tells you”, and we know the result. We cannot overlook her role in achieving an anticipation of the Hour, a change in the divine plan; and we must apply to ourselves her words “Do whatever He tells you”.

2nd Sunday of Christmastide

2nd Sunday of Christmas 2021/22

Sirach 24: 1-4, 12-16; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-18; John 1:1-18

Do you remember the Last Gospel? Those of a certain vintage may recall the days when the priest would dismiss the congregation with the rather puzzling words “Ite missa est”, usually translated “Go, the Mass is ended”, but actually extremely difficult to translate accurately.

Literally, it means “(Something with a feminine ending) has been sent”. The missing word may be “ecclesia” in which case the injunction means “Go. The Church (or assembly) has been sent (or dismissed, or given a mission)”. 

In any case, rather like the policemen in Pirates of Penzance, we didn’t go. Instead, the priest moved to the “Gospel side” of the altar, and read “the Last Gospel”, the beginning of St. John’s Gospel, which we heard proclaimed at the Day Mass on Christmas Day, and which we have heard again today.

How did this custom arise? Clearly, it was an addition to an earlier way of ending Mass, tacked on after the people had, in theory, been sent away.

Apparently, it was originally part of the priest’s private thanksgiving after Mass, but at some point after the Council of Trent, it was made part of the Mass itself, though the Dominicans were never happy about it, and used to extinguish the candles after the Ite Missa est, to signify that they were reading the Last Gospel under protest. Incidentally, it serves as a reminder to be careful when people speak of the “traditional” Latin Mass, as this tradition goes back only so far, and was always subject to change.

What the custom of reading the “Last Gospel” does demonstrate is how importantly this passage was, and indeed, is regarded, as an exposition of the faith. It is a case of St. John doing what he does best, namely theologising, explaining the deeper meaning behind the historical events. Matthew and Luke have their infancy narratives, describing, each in his own way, the events associated with the birth of Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin, and variously designated “Son of the Most High”, “Son of God”, “Saviour”, “King of the Jews”, and, perhaps most tellingly, by Matthew as Emmanuel, a name which, he goes on to explain, means “God is with us”.

John, for his part, goes further and deeper. The new born child is actually God Himself, the Logos or Word, who was with God eternally, who is God, and who is the agent of creation. John describes, or indeed defines, the birth of Jesus, in the words kai ho Logos sarx egeneto –in Latin et verbum caro factum est—and the Word became (or was made) flesh. This was not simply some miraculous baby: it was the pre-existing Word of God, indeed God from all eternity, hinted at in the Wisdom literature, as in today’s First Reading under the name of Wisdom, but greater than that Wisdom, as being begotten not created.

The Bible begins, in the Book of Genesis, with the words, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. How did He create them? He created them through His Word—“God SAID ‘Let there be light’ and there was light”. John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. This was the Word which became flesh, in the womb of the Virgin, through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the Word which God spoke to initiate creation.

So we can see that this passage from St. John’s Gospel, far from being abstract, or even abstruse, is in reality a statement of one of the central truths of our faith: namely that the child of Bethlehem is not only the Messiah, not only the redeemer, but God Himself, who has become one of us. Truly, this is one of the most awe-inspiring passages in the entire Bible.

Midnight Mass 2021

Christmas Midnight Mass 2021

Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2: 1-14

It is another strange Christmas: who would have believed it? Congregations are masked again, there is still no communion from the chalice, no sign of peace, and vulnerable people are still inclined to stay away. Who would have thought it?

Something about it reminds me of what I have read and heard about the First World War. First, there was that conviction that it would all be over in a few months; then there was a death toll way beyond anything which anyone could have imagined—do you remember the government scientist who predicted that Britain was facing a death toll between 7,000 and 20,000? If only! Finally, a sort of dull resignation, a feeling that it would go on forever; that normality would never really return; that life would never be the same again.

Will life ever be the same again? It will probably never be totally the same, because it never is. “Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis” as they say in Hest Bank: “times change, and we change among them”. Life is constantly changing, war or no war, pandemic or no pandemic. Just think of the social changes of the past half century: the rise of co-habitation as a preparation for, or an alternative to, marriage; all the issues around sex and gender; the almost total disappearance of manufacturing industry and of jobs for life; more changes in more ways than you could shake the proverbial stick at.

Perhaps one of the problems after the First World War was that not enough changed, at least at first, though seeds were being sown. Women gave up the jobs they had been doing, and returned to a background role, though 1918 saw some advance in the cause of votes for women, and women were finally given the vote on equal terms with men a decade later. The men returned, not to a brave new world, a home fit for heroes, but to the same old drudgery, mixed now with unemployment and a lack of practical support after all that they had suffered. Yet here too seeds were being sown which would lead to massive changes—and to another world war.

What about today? Will masks become a part of everyday life? Will working from home become the norm? Will health service waiting lists continue to grow?

And what has any of this to do with Christmas? Quite a lot, even if only because this is Christmas, and this is our situation. Yet surely there is far more than that. The Son of God was born into a world every bit as turbulent as ours. The Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire, but its territorial ambitions had not changed, and its rule pressed just as heavily on subject peoples, which is how the Holy Family came to be in Bethlehem in the first place. Before the century was out, the rumbling discontent among the Jewish population would flare into open rebellion, with disastrous consequences whose effect on Judaism is still felt today.

Poverty, displacement, war, and violence formed the background to the birth of the Saviour, as they form the background to much of human life today. Upheaval, disruption, something resembling chaos surrounded Mary and Joseph, all their plans thrown into confusion by angelic messages; childbirth taking place far from home, separated from loved ones, in a far from salubrious, far from comfortable setting.

This was the world into which the Redeemer was born, not a peaceful, comfortable world of painless childbirth, gently lowing cattle, and comforting angels. We know how the angels behaved: they gave their orders, then cleared off. Don’t forget that the final sentence of St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation is “And the angel left her”. Angel choirs may have sung at the birth, but you can bet that they gave no practical help.

This was the world in which the Saviour was born, which He came to redeem: messy, disorganised, confusing, and confused—not very different from our world today. Indeed, many a mother giving birth in a refugee camp or a displaced persons’ hostel must endure a situation very similar to Mary’s.

And our own disordered, Covid-ridden society must seem very familiar to that Saviour whose whole human existence was set among disorder and distress. A dirty stable in a world of pandemonium was enough for Jesus to be born 2,000 years ago: a disrupted Christmas among a puzzled people is an ideal setting for Him to be born anew in you and me today. May the joy of that birth fill and transform you, as it filled and transformed a similarly mixed-up world at the first Christmas of all.

4th Sunday of Advent Year C

4th Sunday of Advent 2021

Micah 5:1-4; Hebrews 10: 5-10; Luke 1:39-44

I think that it is fair to say that preachers do not always cover themselves with glory at this time of year. There is something about the approach of Christmas which seems to bring out the negativity, the inner Grinch, lurking inside some of those who have the responsibility of proclaiming the Good News.

My own parish priest, from my being nine years old until long after I was ordained, was notorious for his homilies at midnight Mass. In 1969, I recall him lambasting US President Richard Nixon for claiming that the moon landing, which had taken place earlier that year, was the greatest day since creation, a complaint which he must have been storing up for months. On another occasion, his voice rose to a crescendo as he roared “Christmas is NOT A TIME for eating until you are SICK, and drinking until you are STUPID!!!”. As my father commented wryly on our way home after Mass: “I am glad we know now what Christmas is about”.

More recently, I recall a priest congratulating himself on this Fourth Sunday of Advent on having delivered what he described as a “hard hitting” message about the evils of consumerism. He might have been less sanguine had he heard a visitor to the parish complaining to me about “that bad tempered priest with his cliché-ridden sermon, churning out all the old tosh about materialism at Christmas”.

This is surely a time of year to be positive, to recognise the signs of Christ’s presence in the world, and to convey that presence to others. That is what Mary does, in her visit to Elizabeth. She has received her own awesome news, that she is to be the mother of the Saviour, but she has also learned of her elderly cousin’s advanced pregnancy. Off she goes meta spoudes—“hastily”, “eagerly”, “as quickly as she could” (JB) to visit her cousin, thus bringing Christ to her and to her unborn child.

It strikes me that there are three lessons there for us. Firstly, Mary wishes to bring her own good news to Elizabeth. Secondly, she is, presumably, coming to help, to do what she can to lighten Elizabeth’s load during the final three months of pregnancy. Thirdly, she actually brings Christ to the household, and opens the way for the Holy Spirit to work.

What are the lessons which I mentioned? Firstly, we should be concerned to lighten the load of others, perhaps at this time above all, when many people, particularly housewives, may feel harassed. Even bearing in mind the difficulties arising from Covid, we should nonetheless take advantage of whatever opportunities we have of being supportive of anyone whom we know to be struggling.

Secondly, we should be bearers of good news. I am not suggesting that we should beat people over the head with the Gospel message: rather, that we be a positive presence, bringing joy by our attitude and approach. By doing that, we shall be bringing Christ to them, and enabling the Holy Spirit to work, far better than by becoming “preachy” and putting people off.

Mary gives a cheerful shout to let Elizabeth know that she is there, and God does the rest. John recognises the presence of the Redeemer, and leaps in the womb: Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. There is no question of “Have you heard the Good News of the Lord Jesus?” Instead, Mary brings the Lord Jesus, and sets the Spirit free to work. Can you and I do that for someone this year—not being heavy footed and preachy, but bringing Jesus and liberating the Holy Spirit simply by our presence, our approach, and our demeanour? Mary went to be positive, helpful, supportive, and thus brought her Son who did the rest. Mary is the model of the Church, of you and me; so that is how we should be, imitating Mary, not the Grinch.

3rd Sunday of Advent Year C

3rd Sunday of Advent 2021

Zephaniah 3:14-18; “Psalm” = Isaiah 12:2-6; Phil 4:4-7; Luke 3:10-18

What sort of mood are you in? There is no doubt about the mood to which Holy Mother Church invites us today. This is Gaudete Sunday—Rejoice Sunday—and the Lectionary lays joy on with a trowel.

“Shout for joy” urges Zephaniah, “Rejoice, exult with all your heart”. And he depicts God too as being full of joy: “He will exult with joy over you...He will dance with shouts of joy for you.”

There is something beautiful about the idea of God dancing, and shouting with joy while He does it. I envisage God doing a sort of Highland Fling, with the odd yell and hoot thrown in.

In our refrain in what follows—not actually a psalm, but an extract from the Book of Isaiah—we exhort ourselves to “sing and shout for joy”, and we do it four times. Meanwhile, Isaiah goes on to tell us “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation” before reaching the refrain which we have been using, and ordering “People of Zion, sing and shout for joy”.

Next comes Paul’s advice to the Christians at Philippi: “Rejoice in the Lord always—again I say rejoice”. This gives us a grand total of a dozen uses of the words “joy” and “rejoice” in the course of two prose passages and a would-be psalm.

So, rejoice! “I can’t” you may reply. “My pet budgie has just died screaming, I have trodden barefoot on broken glass, and my mother-in-law is staying over Christmas.”

More seriously, you may genuinely say “I have suffered bereavement” or “I am deeply depressed”. I heard from two people last week, men around the sixty mark, whom I taught in my early days as a priest. Both of them have been widowed in the past year, and are feeling the pain as each approaches his first Christmas without his spouse. To make things worse, one of them was woken by the police one night a few days ago to be informed that his younger brother had been found dead. He himself has now suffered a heart attack.

A few days later, I was asked to pray for a two year old boy who is on a ventilator suffering from leukaemia. Multiply these situations almost infinitely as you consider all the bereaved spouses, children, and parents around the world; all those in war zones; those suffering from hunger, disease, severe handicap, or depression; and ask “Where are such people to find joy?” Indeed, you may be asking it about yourself.

Beware! Do not try to come up with an easy, comfortable answer, because in such circumstances, no genuine answer is easy or comfortable. It may even be the case that there is no answer, easy or difficult. All that you can do is to hold that suffering person in your heart, your mind, and your prayer. If they are physically close to you, you may even hold them in your arms. Do not try to console them with clichés: silent, loving presence is a far better option.

So what price joy then? Remember that, like grief, joy goes very deep. Like grief, it comes upon us: it can’t be forced. Sometimes, we have to wait in patience, and gradually joy will seep through. Even in the darkest times, we have to cling, even if only by our fingertips, to trust in God, and the light will eventually dawn. And remember to be there, as a source of strength, for those from whom joy may seem to be very distant.

2nd Sunday of Advent

2nd Sunday of Advent 2021

Baruch 5:1-9; Psalm 125; Philippians 1:3-6, 8-11; Luke 3:1-6

John the Baptist is one of the key figures of Advent. Why? “That’s obvious,” I hear you cry. “He was the forerunner of Jesus.”

You are quite right. Bear in mind, though, that he acted as the forerunner twice. Firstly, he was the forerunner in his birth. The visitation to his father Zechariah, his conception against all likelihood,  his leaping in his mother’s womb at the presence of the unborn Jesus, and his birth and naming all presaged similar events for Jesus the incarnate Son of God.

At John’s birth, you may recall, his father proclaimed the Benedictus, the prophecy that this child would “go ahead of the Lord, to prepare His ways before Him”. It is this second fulfilment of the forerunner’s role on which we focus today. The first, infantile, fulfilment won’t be in focus until our post-17th December preparation for the Nativity.

So it is the adult John whom we encounter today, preparing the way for the adult Jesus, reminding us that Advent is at least as much about the coming of Jesus here and now, in our daily lives, as it is about His past coming. The call to prepare a way for the Lord is addressed to us as powerfully as it was to John the Baptist.

All three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) quote, or rather misquote, this saying from the prophet whom we call Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. All of them say “A voice cries in the wilderness: prepare a way for the Lord”. What the prophet actually wrote was “A voice cries: prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord”.

Either way, the quotation fits the situation encountered by the Baptist, and the situation which we encounter today. The Gospel version emphasises the loneliness of the Baptist: he is a voice crying in the wilderness, a lone voice, as we feel ourselves to be in the world of today. Yet at the same time, the world to which he preaches is a wilderness, as our contemporary world may also be.

I spent the first fortnight of Advent in 1982, helping to deliver a parish mission in Marylebone. As I tramped the streets of north London, attempting to track down the birds of passage who had self-identified as Catholics during the last parish census, which appeared to have been taken while Noah was building the Ark, as I discovered that most of them were long gone, and as I encountered locked doors, or was greeted by uncomprehending voices calling down from upstairs windows, all in the shadow of the rather sinister Paddington Green police station, notorious at the time for the interrogation of IRA suspects, I felt very sharply the sensation of being a voice crying in the wilderness, calling out to an unheeding world.

When Deutero-Isaiah delivered his prophecy, it was in the context of the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, the same context as today’s reading from the prophet Baruch, and the responsorial psalm. This was a triumphant return, the way made easy, in the imagination of both prophets, by the removal of all obstacles, the levelling of the ground.

Like the prophets, John the Baptist imagined the removal of those obstacles which stood in the way of God’s people, and of God Himself. That same John was to play his part in the removal of those obstacles, and so are we. What are the obstacles in the way of the Lord who comes to us today?

Rather than mountains and hills, we encounter indifference, misunderstanding, and hostility. The world, at least here in Europe, has no enthusiasm for the coming of the Christ, for the Kingdom, or Reign, of God. Like the Jewish exiles portrayed in the psalm, we may feel that we are sowing in tears: unlike them, we struggle to imagine ourselves returning full of song, since our harvest appears to be a scanty one. We do not hear the heathen saying “What marvels the Lord worked for them”.

But then again, neither did John the Baptist. Yes, he had initial success—people flocked to him—yet he ended his life in prison under sentence of death. What mattered was not the success or failure of his mission, but his faithfulness to it. His task was to sow, to prepare, to open the way for the One who was to come.

Our task is the same: to be faithful to the call we have received from God. By our prayer, by our way of life, by the steadfastness of our response to the God who calls us, we are to sow seeds, we are to prepare the way for the One who comes after us. That is our Advent mission: not simply to indulge in a sentimental remembrance of His first coming, but to smooth His passage as He comes again.

1st Sunday Advent Year C

1st Sunday of Advent 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thess 3:12-4:2; Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36

If I were to ask you “What is Advent about?” I suspect that most of you would reply “Preparing for Christmas” and you would be right—up to a point. Advent IS a preparation for Christmas, just as Lent is a preparation for Easter, and to the same extent.

Lent is a preparation for Easter, but I am sure that you would agree that it is far more than that. It is also a matter of following Jesus into the wilderness and, in the events of Holy Week, to the Cross. Advent too is far wider than we might imagine.

In Advent, we look in three directions. We look backwards, to the First Coming of the Son of God in our human flesh, but we also look forward to His Second Coming in glory as Judge at the end of time, and we look to the present, to recognise His coming at every moment of our lives.

The looking back is present today in our First Reading which, in the time of its writing, was a looking forward. Jeremiah prepares the people for the coming of a “virtuous branch”, a descendant of the House of David “who shall practise honesty and integrity in the land”. We identify that “virtuous branch” as Jesus, Messiah and Saviour, whose birth we recall in our Christ Mass, our Christmas celebration.

Yet we must be careful not to rush to Christmas too soon. The promise of the Messiah and, more particularly, of His Kingdom, will be kept before our eyes throughout Advent by our reading of the prophet Isaiah, but it is important to remember that the Church does not begin to focus on the Christmas event until 17th December, devoting the last week of Advent to proximate preparation for the feast, as the last week of Lent is a proximate preparation for Easter.

Until then, our focus is directed to the Second Coming of Our Lord, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to His present coming every day in our lives. Consequently today’s Gospel prepares us, not for the First Coming of Jesus, which has already happened, but for His return in glory.

The warnings contained in Jesus’ prophecy seem to take on a particular urgency in our own time. We are literally “bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves” as rising sea levels threaten the very existence of island nations such as the Maldives, the Bahamas, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, while dire predictions tell us that the melting of the polar ice will bring increasingly destructive flooding to our own coastal areas. Nations are in agony throughout the earth, and there are many signs of impending disaster.

Whether all of this presages the imminent return of the Son of Man I do not know, but there is certainly enough evidence of our own mortality to shake us out of complacency. While we make our own small efforts to protect the world, uniting them with, we hope, the larger scale efforts of governments, we remain conscious that we live each day in the light of eternity, and that an end, and a final encounter with the Judge, will come for us, if not yet for the earth.

So, as both the Gospel and the reading from the First Letter to the Thessalonians remind us, we must remain alert, conscious that each day may be our last, and using that awareness not to fill us with despair, or to lead us to seek refuge in Christmas lights, alcoholic oblivion, or even sentimental devotion, but to lead us to deeper prayer, and a stronger love for our neighbour both near and far.

We look, then, in Advent, both back and forward, but, perhaps most importantly, we look around, to recognise the coming of Christ and His presence here and now, today. We deepen our awareness of the Christ who comes today, in the people who cross our path, whether closely or remotely, of whom Our Lord said “whatever you did to the least of mine you did to me”; in the events of daily life, which bring us a share in the anguish of Gethsemane and Calvary and in the joy of the Resurrection, in the silence of our private prayer, and in the Mass where He comes in the gathering of His people, in His word, and in the Body broken and the Blood poured out, offered to the Father and shared with us.

Jesus came in the past; He will come in the future; but especially, He does come in the present, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. As Karl Rahner, the great twentieth century German Jesuit theologian and spiritual writer, expressed in a prayer to Jesus: “Now is the one single hour of your Advent.”

Christ the King Year B

Christ the King 2021

Daniel 7:13-14; Apocalypse 1:5-8; John 18: 33-37

“Kings ain’t what they used to be”, to misquote the old song. I think that I am correct in saying that the only old style king, the only absolute monarch, remaining in today’s world, is to be found in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, in southern Africa.

Other countries, though not a great number, have constitutional monarchs, largely figureheads, and indeed Spain restored the monarchy in 1975. Our own Queen is widely respected for her devotion to duty, as she continues to carry out commitments at the age of 95; for her wisdom, acquired through an engagement with, and a study of, international affairs stretching back over seventy years; and for her common sense, evident in her speeches which show up, by contrast, the stupidity and cupidity of many politicians, not least in her Christmas broadcasts, in which she is the only public figure to

refer to Jesus, without hesitation, as Our Lord. Whether a similar respect will be accorded to her successor is open to question for a whole variety of reasons.

In general, we can see kingship as an outmoded concept, and the Feast of Christ the King as an anomaly, an oddity in the eyes of the inhabitants of most countries, a relatively new feast which, perhaps, deserves to be quietly dropped from the liturgical calendar.

Whether plans to drop it exist, I have no idea. For the present, at least, it remains, and we must do our best to make something of it. In this attempt, the irrelevance of kings may actually be a help, rather than a hindrance.

Why might that be? It is because Christ, as a king, is seen as an irrelevance in His own time. Indeed, this irrelevance in the eyes of the world forms the basis of His kingship. Pilate, as we have heard, sees it as a basis for insult, asking “Are you the King of the Jews?”, a sarcastic question, showing contempt for Jesus, but having a particular edge for the Jewish people who, since the Babylonian Exile centuries before, had considered that only God could be their king.

Pilate was to follow through on this sneering question, affixing the proclamation “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” to the Cross in no fewer than three languages, announcing to the world his contempt, not only for the criminal hanging there, but for the whole of Jesus’ subject race. Thus, the whole concept of the kingship of Christ began as an insulting joke.

It began too as a questioning of truth. “All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice” said Our Lord, and we recall Pilate’s presumably mocking response “What is truth?”, a question and a mockery which are effectively echoed to day by politicians in many parts of the world, by the wielders of wealth, and even by certain bishops, to say nothing of the “influencers” who post lies and insults on social media.

Christ’s kingship then, is a matter of affirming, and living for, truth. Into that kingship, awkward as the word may be, we are baptised, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us. Consequently, this feast is, for us, a reminder and a summons to live always in truth, being true to ourselves, which means being true to our rebirth as children of God, and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

Inevitably, this will bring us into conflict with those elements in the world which effectively deny the reality or the importance of truth, the truth of the Lordship of Christ and of the  dignity of every human being. We must insist too on the truth which is expressed through justice and, as we are becoming increasingly aware, through a respectable stewardship of the whole of creation.

This conflict with the denial of truth will bring us to share in the sufferings of Christ, whose kingship was declared on a Cross. It is in the crucifixion of Christ that we recognise Him as our King, our ruler, our leader, whatever term we wish to use—a term which identifies us with Him, and which demands that we follow Him in our own commitment to truth.