1st Sunday of Advent Year A

1st Sunday of Advent 2022

Isaiah 2: 1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24: 37-44

“Wake up! Wake up! Stay awake! Stay awake!”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, why? It’s almost winter. Sensible animals are hibernating. Why do we have to stay awake?”

Of course, you already know. It is because Christ is coming. No, I don’t mean at Christmas, plonked in a manger, looking old enough to be at school, serenaded by often gloopy carols. That is a past event, to be recalled and celebrated certainly, though we don’t begin preparing for that until 17th December.

Nor do I just mean at the end of time, when He will come for judgement, bringing everything to a close, establishing the fullness of the Kingdom; though you will hear more about that than about the first Christmas during the early part of Advent.

No, I mean what St. Bernard called the third coming of Christ, which falls between His first and second comings, and which happens every day. Christ is coming here and now, today, in every moment of your life and mine; and it is for that coming, that Advent, that St. Paul, writing to the Christians of Rome, and Jesus, warning His disciples, call us to wake up, to stay awake, to be alert.

Christ is coming, and He is here. Where? You know that too. Especially is He present in the Mass, in four ways, as the General Instruction of the Missal reminds us. Firstly, He is here in the gathering of His people; in you, and the people around you. “Wherever two or three gather in my name, I shall be there with them” He told us, so already He is here, in and among you. Take a quick look around, and see the face of Christ in all the people here, and remain awake enough to take that recognition of His face, in the faces of His people, away with you.

He is here in the person of the priest, standing at the altar, representing Christ the High Priest, offering the sacrifice with and on behalf of you, God’s priestly people. He is here in His word, proclaimed in the scriptures, sinking into you now, being absorbed by you to become part of you and of your ongoing daily life.

Most powerfully, He is present in His body, broken for you, and in His blood poured out for you, making present here and now the sacrifice of Calvary, offered to the Father, given to you as food and drink, the very life of the crucified and risen Jesus.

The Eucharist is the sacrifice which reveals the meaning of Advent, which speaks always of the already and the not yet. All through the early weeks of Advent, we shall be reminded of the already and the not yet of the Kingdom. We shall repeatedly hear the Prophet Isaiah looking forward, mentioning some sign of the Kingdom; then the Gospel will show us Jesus fulfilling that sign, revealing that the Kingdom is already present, though its fullness is not yet.

In the broken body and the poured out blood of the Eucharist, we share in the Messianic banquet which Isaiah will foretell as part of the Kingdom, though that banquet is far from complete as yet. We shall see, touch, and receive Jesus the Son of God, but hidden under signs, not yet present in glory. And so we shall be reminded of the truth of Advent, that Christ is coming, and that He is here; that the Kingdom will be established, and that it is already present.

All of this was set in train by the first coming of Christ at the first Christmas; it will be completed by His second coming at the end of time; it is present in that third, intermediate coming which takes place every day, which is both revealed and concealed in the Mass, and which we shall fail to notice if we are not awake. Wake up to the present Advent of Christ, and His future Advent will not take us unawares.

Christ the King Year C

 Christ the King 2022

2 Sam 5:1-3; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:35-43

“The Queen is dead: long live the King”, if anybody is interested. Now, don’t misunderstand me: I am well aware that millions of people throughout the world were interested in the Queen. The death of Elizabeth II brought expressions of admiration and respect from all parts of the globe. Even Sinn Fein, which used regularly to be described as “the political wing of the IRA” expressed condolences, and two of its leaders told King Charles that his mother had contributed greatly to the peace process.

Queen Elizabeth was admired for her personal qualities. For seventy five years, she strove to fulfil the promise made on her 21st birthday that she would devote her life “whether it be short or long” to the service of the people of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Two days before her death at the age of 96, she was still working. How many of us, if we live so long (which God forbid in my case) will be able to claim the same?

Elizabeth II’s faith was something which she wore on her sleeve, as the only public figure who would repeatedly refer to Jesus as “Our Lord” without an instant’s hesitation. She was also a good friend of the Catholic Church, enjoying a warm relationship with both Cardinals Hume (to whom she referred as “our cardinal”) and Murphy-O’Connor.

Now, as she has gone to her reward, we have a king, though I am not sure that anybody has noticed. He is the Duke of Lancaster, which confers some importance on him, but, other than that, King Charles III seems largely to pass under the radar. To misquote a song made famous by Max Bygraves “Kings ain’t what they used to be”.

But stop a moment. What kind of king was the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords? He was a joke king, deliberately so. The sign affixed to the Cross—“This is the King of the Jews” as Luke reports it—was a jest, a calculated insult both to Jesus Himself, and more particularly to the Jewish people.

Pontius Pilate was declaring that the Jewish people, on their own soil, were so abject, so pathetic, that a humiliated, bloodstained wreck of a man wearing a crown of thorns, was the only person fit to be their king. Yet the insult went far deeper than that. For centuries, ever since their return from the Babylonian Exile, the very concept of a king had been abhorrent to the Jews, who now acknowledged no king but God Himself. To have a dying criminal declared as their king was a religious, as well as a national, insult.

Effectively, it meant that this despised and rejected figure was being presented to them as God. Isn’t that the greatest irony of all? For so indeed He was. This broken man was indeed the one in whom and for whom all things were created, as the Letter to the Colossians declares: He was the beginning, and was to be the first born from the dead, truly the King of the Jews because truly God.

Who noticed? A thief, a crook, one who by his own admission deserved his sentence and punishment. As, throughout His life, Jesus had attracted the poor and the wretched, beginning with the Bethlehem shepherds, so at His death it was one of the lowest of the low who glimpsed the truth behind the appearance, who realised, however dimly, the truth of Jesus’ kingship.

What are the implications for us? I suggest that they are twofold. Firstly, if we are to understand who Jesus is, we must somehow see Him with the eyes of the poor and lowly, and not from the viewpoint of the ambitious, the power-seekers, those with a sense of self-importance. Secondly, because we have been baptised into the kingship of Christ, we must be imitators of Jesus in His self-sacrificing love, a love “costing not less than everything” as TS Eliot expressed it: a love which sees the potential for paradise even in the most wretched of people. And incidentally, if we are going to have a king, nay even a Duke of Lancaster, perhaps it will be no bad thing if he largely passes unnoticed.

33rd Week Year C

33rd Sunday 2022

Malachi 3:19-20; 2 Thess 3:7-12; Luke 1:5-19

It is some years since I travelled by train out of London Euston, so I don’t know whether that slogan is still painted on a gable end, to be seen to the right of the tracks within the first minute or so of your journey. It reads (or read) “Prepare to meet thy God” not perhaps the most comforting message when you have just entrusted your life to the railway company.

I recall too the Sporting Sam cartoon strip in the Sunday Express of the 1950s and 60s. The particular version which I have in mind came at the end of the football season when all the issues of promotion and relegation had been settled. In the first frame, Sam is confronted by a man wielding a placard reading “The end of the world is nigh”. He smirks, and heads around the corner, where a newspaper flyer reads “Who goes up: who goes down. Official”. In the final frame, Sam can be seen gulping, his hair on end and his eyes like saucers.

Are we confronting the imminent end of the world? Certainly, there are enough wars and revolutions to disturb the most sanguine among us. Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Nigeria, Iran, Nicaragua, Lebanon, DRC, Ethiopia are only some of the countries where either open war is raging, or rebel movements or oppressive governments are making life precarious for many.

Earthquakes, plagues, and famines are numerous. Recently we have heard of high death tolls from crushes at a football match in Indonesia and an outdoor party in Seoul, South Korea; mud slides in the Philippines, and a bridge collapse in India. Famine again stalks parts of Africa, and the effects of pollution and global warming threaten the very survival of the human race.

So is the writing on that north London wall grimly prophetic? Is the end of the world at hand? Are these the last days?

I think we have to admit that we do not know. Jesus warned His disciples that the Jerusalem Temple, the focal point of the Jewish faith, would soon be destroyed, a prophecy fulfilled during the crushing of the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 70 BC.

This must have seemed to many Jews like the end of the world, but says Our Lord “the end is not so soon”. The so-called Wailing Wall of the Temple stands to this day, a reminder of both glory and destruction, and a sign of ongoing conflict, as Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians struggle over the holy site and the right to live in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.

Many thousands have died in this conflict, and in its equivalents throughout the world. For such victims of violence, their times have indeed been the end times, as their own lives, and much that they fought for, have been destroyed. Natural and man-made disasters have brought the end times for countless others. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, many of us feared the end of the world via a nuclear holocaust, particularly at this time of year sixty years ago during the Cuban missile crisis.

Now our fear concerns the destruction of planet Earth, the result of a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, many of whose effects are already both visible and tangible. It is surely ironic that the Cop 27 Conference, meeting to discuss ways of averting disaster, entails the pumping of vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as delegates fly to and from Egypt.

What does all of this tell us? It reminds us that we, at least as individuals, are not built to last. We have built-in obsolescence, and we need to be conscious of living each day in the light of eternity. Each day, we must indeed prepare to meet our God.

Perhaps, for the world as a whole, it is still true that “the end is not so soon”. We do not know, but we must do all in our power to ensure that we leave a beautiful and habitable planet for succeeding generations for as long as God deems it good. Let our carelessness not be responsible for a premature ending.

32nd Sunday Year C

32nd Sunday 2022

2 Macc 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thess  2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

I know that it is good for us to be exposed to as much of the Bible as possible, but I do wonder how much inspiration we are likely to draw from today’s Gospel account of the Sadducees and their tall tale of the one bride for seven brothers. Its chief value seems to me to be a warning to us not to become involved in silly and pointless arguments with people who have no interest in serious discussion, but are simply trying to score points. Our Lord gives these people short shrift, simply pointing to the absurdity of the case they invent, and refusing to be drawn into a lengthy debate: we would be wise to do the same.

There will be people who will ask questions because they seriously want to understand the nature of, and the reasons for, our faith. In such cases we need to engage seriously with them, doing our best to answer their questions, to meet their objections, and to tease out difficulties.

This demands of us that we have a deep relationship with God, and a clear understanding of what we believe. We need to be familiar with the Bible, and with the teachings of the Church, drawn both from the Bible and from the tradition developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit over two thousand years.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1994, is our best guide here. If that seems a bit too heavy, then the Compendium of the Catechism, published a dozen years later by the CTS, and comprising just 174 pages, with an appendix of familiar prayers, should prove accessible to anybody. I don’t think that we can still be satisfied, as adults, with the old “Penny Catechism” on which many of us were brought up, and which doesn’t answer some of the challenges thrown up by the modern age.

Today’s First Reading, set in the context of the Jewish revolt led by the Maccabean clan against the Seleucid occupation of the second century BC, appears to be linked with the Gospel on the fairly flimsy ground that it also deals with seven brothers who die. The two Books of Maccabees belong to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament) and in their case, and a number of other books such as Wisdom, and Sirach, there is no Hebrew version. Hence, they tend to be given less weight than those which appear in both Hebrew and Greek.

Hence they are known as deutero-canonical—effectively, second string. In Catholic editions of the Bible, the deutero-canonical books are usually included in the main body, whereas non-Catholic versions often refer to them as the Apocrypha, and to print them together, at the end of the Old Testament. This can be slightly confusing, as the Apocryphal Gospels are something else entirely, rejected as not genuine, and not included in the Bible at all.

Today’s extract is valuable in reminding us of the threat of persecution, remote perhaps for us, but very real for our ancestors, and for huge numbers of Christians in many parts of the world today.  The history of our own English, Lancashire, and indeed Lancaster martyrs is a reminder of the courage demanded of our forebears in keeping the Catholic faith, and especially the Mass, alive in this country, and a valuable ecumenical resource as an example of courage in faith to which all can relate.

Yet for many, persecution and martyrdom, far from being an historical memory, are a present reality. Not only are there active persecution of and discrimination against, Christians in many, though not all, majority Muslim countries , and attempts by Islamist groups such as Isis, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and al-Shabbab to destroy Christianity in the Middle East and large parts of Africa, but even in nominally Christian nations in Latin America, people of faith are being murdered for their witness against dictatorial regimes, rapacious landowners, and drug barons.

Today, as always throughout history, persecution exists, along with cultural assaults on faith. We need to be well-informed about our faith, and constant in prayer and solidarity with all who suffer, anywhere in our world.

31st Sunday of the Year

31st Sunday 2022

Wisdom 11:22-12:2; 2Thess 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10

Do you like tax collectors? No, neither do I. In fact, at present I am scrutinising my bank statements to ensure that I will be able to keep the tax man happy come 31st January. No one, I suspect likes paying taxes, yet we know that, without them, we would have no health service, no schools, no public services at all.

Consequently, we see HMRC (formerly the Inland Revenue) as a necessary evil. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, however, there was a more serious issue: tax collectors were seen, not merely as a burden, but as a set of traitors. They were collecting taxes on behalf of the occupying power: to use a term popular in the Second World War, they were collaborators.

Some were also extortionists. The publicani, as they were known (why, I wonder, has the word “publican” come to mean a licensed victualler rather than a tax collector? Someone will know.) were assigned a certain amount which must be handed over to the Roman authorities. What they chose to collect beyond that, as their own salary, was up to them, and it was assumed, rightly or wrongly, that many of them demanded more than was reasonable.

It was, however, their association with the hated Roman state which put them beyond the pale. It reminds me of a true story which I was told about a Catholic postman in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. The unionists wouldn’t speak to him because he had “stolen a Protestant job”: the nationalists disowned him because he wore the Crown on his uniform.

For the Jews of Palestine there was a further issue. The coins in which the taxes were paid bore the head of the Emperor, who was designated “divus”, or divine. So the publicani were regarded as religious and not simply national traitors, and so were classed with the prostitutes as public sinners.

Yet this particular tax collector Zacchaeus was to undergo a conversion. Something must have been stirring in him already to move him to make a public exhibition of himself. He was, we are told, a senior tax collector, a high ranking public official, yet he was prepared to make a spectacle of himself by shinning up a tree, acceptable behaviour perhaps for hoi polloi, but not for someone of his status.

Then Jesus looks at him, and speaks to him, and his conversion is complete. To allow Jesus to look at us, and speak to us, calling us by name, is to open us to conversion. Like Zacchaeus, we need to put ourselves in a position to be looked at, to be called by name. We need to put aside, for a time, the daily routine; to make a space and a time to be alone, to clear our minds of the turmoil of every day, and to wait in stillness and silence.

Jesus will come to us, will look at us, will call us by name. We won’t hear a voice, but if we are patient, we will feel the stirring of His call to us; we will know the areas in which we need to change, to be converted. And, as Jesus went to Zacchaeus’ house to spend time with him, so He will spend time with us, provided we are not too busy, too distracted, too caught up in the affairs of the world.

Many tax collectors became followers of Jesus. Did they abandon their jobs in order to do so? We know that Levi Matthew did; perhaps others also decided that a more radical following of Jesus was required, and left their employment, which may help to explain the false accusation at Jesus’ trial that He opposed the payment of taxes to Caesar.

There is no indication that Zacchaeus intended to do the same, or that Jesus demanded it. Perhaps Our Lord saw the accusations of treason and religious disloyalty as expressions of nationalism rather than of true piety. It was a change of heart that He demanded, rather than a change of employer. What change of heart does He demand of you and me?

30th Sunday Year C

30th Sunday 2022

Ecclesiasticus 35: 12-14, 16-19; 2 Tim 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

Which are you then: the Pharisee or the tax collector? I suspect that no one today would admit to being the Pharisee. In fact, modern society has rewritten this parable. Today it runs: “I thank myself”—today’s society won’t thank God—“that I am not like this Pharisee. I don’t go to church, or say prayers, because I am not a hypocrite. I don’t have hang ups about sex, or obey silly rules around it. I hold all the fashionable viewpoints. I criticise the Church as being wealthy, but I would never dream of giving anything myself to help the poor, because that is the job of the state, or the Church, or their families, or somebody. I respect all opinions, provided they agree with mine, and I am glad that I don’t believe in sin, like this silly tax collector, who would be all right if he didn’t cling to old fashioned notions.”

All of this shows that the Pharisee is actually alive and well, and living in.....well, is he living at all in us? It doesn’t mean that he isn’t, if we agree with the tax collector that we are sinners, because even that can be a form of self-indulgence, as is shown in the old Jewish story of the rabbi, the cantor, and the synagogue cleaner, which could just as easily be a Catholic story about a bishop, a priest, and a church cleaner.

The rabbi stands at the front of the synagogue, and beats his breast, exclaiming “I am nothing. I am nothing.”

Beside him stands the cantor, who beats his breast, exclaiming “I am nothing. I am nothing.”

And at the back of the synagogue is the little cleaner, who beats his breast, exclaiming “I am nothing. I am nothing.”

And the rabbi turns to the cantor, and says “Just look who thinks he is nothing!”

What is the real difference between the tax collector and the Pharisee? The tax collector doesn’t make comparisons. He doesn’t judge the Pharisee: rather, he looks at his own sinfulness, and confesses that. Notice something else: he doesn’t go rooting in his conscience to decide which sins he is prepared to confess, or how to dress them up to make them look less serious than they are; or how he can exaggerate them to show what a wonderful penitent he is. He simply recognises his sinfulness for what it is, and admits it, and throws himself on God’s mercy.

So I ask again: which are you, the Pharisee or the tax collector? If you or I make comparisons, if we judge people, if we consider ourselves better than other people in any way, then you or I are/am the Pharisee.

Can you, can I, honestly claim that we never do that? If I were to ask your views about politicians, Church leaders, this celebrity or that one, could you honestly tell me that you don’t have opinions ready formed, opinions which are, more likely than not, negative? If I were to ask you about the people down your street, about young people, about unemployed people, about Jews, about Muslims, about wealthy people, about poor people, what would your reaction be?

Sometimes your opinion may be correct, but that is not the point. “Who am I to judge?” asked Pope Francis on a famous occasion, for which he was castigated by self-righteous people in the Church. What was he doing other than obey Our Lord’s command “Do not judge”? No doubt the people present at Calvary judged the thieves crucified with Jesus to be villains, and they were correct, yet one of them was promised an immediate place in Paradise.

“God be merciful to me, a sinner” says the tax collector of the parable, and he goes home at rights with God. He concerns himself with his own sin, not that of the Pharisee, and he asks for God’s mercy. Do you and I do the same?

29th Sunday Year C

29th Sunday 2022

Exodus 17: 8-13; 2Tim 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8

“He will see justice done to them, and done speedily.”

Excuse me, Lord, but are you sure about that? You see, there seem to be so many people who don’t receive justice, or, if they do, it takes a long time.

I am thinking first of people who were abused as children. Take the pupils in the indigenous schools in North America as an example. They didn’t receive justice, did they, at least, not in their lifetime? Some justice is being done now, but most of the victims are dead. Presumably they have justice in heaven, buy would you really call that speedy?

Then there are the adults who have survived childhood sexual abuse. How many of them are still suffering psychologically? They say that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” but that doesn’t appear to be true for them. Many of the perpetrators are being punished now, decades after the events, but that seems to me to be very much delayed as an instance of justice—and how far does it really help the victims? I know someone who had to attend her father’s funeral, and listen to his praises being sung, while she was bearing the inner wounds of a childhood in which he had sexually abused her. Was there justice there, or must she too wait for eternity?

Also, there is what might be called the other side of the coin. You don’t need me to remind you of the police officer, a good friend of yours, whose work was based on abuse cases, and who commented ruefully “It is the one case where you are guilty until proven innocent, and juries cannot be trusted”.

Of course you and I know how true that last remark is. Many people are familiar with the case of Cardinal Pell, who was twice convicted by juries, even though it was physically impossible for him to have committed the alleged offences, a fact finally accepted by the Australian Supreme Court, who tore to shreds the behaviour of the lower courts. In the end, the cardinal received justice, but only after serving a long time in jail, with all the accompanying opprobrium.

Nor do we have to go Down Under to find such cases. You and I know of at least two priests in this country who also were imprisoned for offences which it was impossible for them to have committed. In the one case, the judge told the jury three times that, if it was one person’s word against another, they must acquit, but they ignored his instructions: in the other, as you will recall, the prosecution did not challenge the evidence of impossibility, but the jury convicted and an innocent man died in jail.

What about the Jews, the original chosen people, and all that they have suffered through the ages, reaching its nadir in the Holocaust, but not ending there? Did the Nuremberg trials bring them justice? And now, some of their descendants, in the form of the State of Israel, are acting unjustly towards the Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian.

I suppose that we have to seek an answer to all these contradictions in what happened to you. You were denied justice. You received a mockery of a trial, and underwent dreadful physical and psychological abuse, before being subjected to a brutal execution. You were vindicated and recompensed in your resurrection; and I suppose that we must look for a similar vindication, a similar recompense, for all who suffer unjustly; but, if I may say so, one might have hoped for justice in this life. And when you ask whether, on your return, you will find any faith on earth, please excuse me for suggesting that these delays in justice have contributed to the loss of faith for so many.

28th Sunday Year C

28th Sunday 2022

2 Kings 5:14-17; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

Pondering today’s readings, I was struck, as you may well have been, by a series of points. Firstly, we have two accounts, in the Second Book of Kings and St. Luke’s Gospel respectively, of people being cured of leprosy. Secondly, in both accounts, a non-Jew, someone who is not a member of God’s Chosen People, is involved: a pagan, in the case of Naaman the Syrian; a schismatic or heretic in the person of the Samaritan cured by Jesus.

Thirdly, in both instances, the non-Jew shows gratitude, both to the person instrumental in the cure, and to God. Fourthly, in the Gospel episode, the gratitude displayed by the non-Jew is contrasted with the failure of the members of the Chosen People to exhibit the same degree of gratitude.

So far, so simple: we can take, from what we have, a call to feel and to express gratitude, both to human beings and to God, coupled with a reminder that non-Catholics, non-Christians, non-believers, may sometimes show greater gratitude than we do; that we may sometimes take things for granted.

Already, there is a fair amount to consider. Am I a grateful person? Do I recognise how much is done for me by others, and how much I receive from God? Do I feel gratitude, and do I express it?

There has been correspondence on Facebook concerning the almost universal practice of thanking the driver on alighting from a bus. Many of us grew up in the days when you didn’t actually see the bus driver, who was ensconced in his cab. You might encounter the conductor/tress as you prepared to disembark, but as you had already thanked him or her for your ticket, you were unlikely to repeat your thanks. Now, travelling frequently by bus from Lancaster to Carnforth, I have noticed that every school pupil, for instance, from a variety of schools, thanks the driver on their way off the bus, in contradiction of the claim by some members of older generations that today’s young people are devoid of manners, a claim which has, of course, been made about every generation of young people since the world’s beginning.

That is a very basic example. Do you and I behave in a similar way in every circumstance, and do we think of thanking God for all that we receive: life, food, friendship, fresh air, football, the gift of God’s Son as our Redeemer, His sacrifice on the Cross, our sharing of that sacrifice in every Mass, the sacraments, our membership of His people? As you know, the Mass is also known as the Eucharist, and Eucharist literally means thanksgiving, so an ungrateful Mass-goer is a contradiction in terms.

There is, though, more to the readings than this message, crucial though it is. Why, for instance, does Naaman ask for earth from the land of Israel? The reason is that people believed in various national gods, and you were expected to worship the god on whose land you stood. By standing on Israelite soil back home in Egypt, Naaman would be entitled to worship the God of Israel, in whom he had come to believe.

But what about the Jewish lepers cured by Our Lord? Were they simply ungrateful? Probably not: instead, they were hampered by their religious obligations. Until they had received a certificate from the priest, they could not be recognised as free from leprosy, and so would still be unable to circulate freely, or to take part in civil or religious life. Can we blame them for putting that before anything else? Perhaps they returned later to thank Jesus: perhaps they thanked and praised God once they had their status confirmed. At least for a time, religion got in the way of their thanksgiving. I leave it to you to consider whether that can still happen.

27th Sunday Year C

27th Sunday 2022

Habbakuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4; 2Tim 1: 6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10

Drat the Jerusalem Bible. Once again, it has messed up a translation. Jesus doesn’t tell us to say that we are “merely servants”, but that we are achreioi “useless” or “unprofitable” servants.

What does He mean by that? He appears to be saying that we have no grounds for giving ourselves airs, no reason to swank, to show off, to congratulate ourselves. So often, we fall short of what we could and should achieve, and some of our supposed triumphs may sometimes turn out to be disasters.

Think of the residential schools in Canada, for which the Pope has just apologised to the indigenous peoples of that country—the First Nation Canadians, as they are known; the Native Americans in the United States; those whom we, most insensitively, used to call Red Indians. Those who ran these schools, at the behest of the government, may well have prided themselves on wiping out the native culture, on “bringing {these people} to Christ”. The Holy Father has described what they did as “cultural genocide”, and has deplored the cruelty which so often accompanied attempts at conversion.

In many parts of the world, at various times in history, the spread of the Gospel was accompanied by, or even accomplished by, the sword. We rightly deplore the conduct of jihadists today: we should not forget that Christians have behaved equally badly, not least in the Crusades.

Even today, some of the wilder evangelicals use what amounts to brainwashing in their attempts to convert people to their own somewhat unchristian version of Christianity. During my university days, the Catholic chaplain commented that he spent half his time attempting to put back together the shattered remnants of faith and self-respect in people who had fallen into the clutches of these characters. Within the Catholic Church, there is a group whose founder was actually canonised by Pope St. John Paul II, which has done immense harm to families, including my own, by the underhand and dishonest recruitment methods recommended by that same founder.

All such people come very clearly under the heading “useless servants”, but so do we. Our best efforts, if they produce good fruit, do so by the grace of God. How many of them prove to have been misdirected, even harmful?

This could cause us to become disheartened, to wonder if anything is worth doing. This should not be the case. We need to bear in mind those words to Timothy: “God’s gift was a spirit, not of timidity, but of power, and love, and self-control”. Again, the Jerusalem Bible is somewhat naughty in its translation, repeating the word “spirit” and giving it a capital letter the second time, distinguishing “a spirit” from “THE Holy Spirit”. This isn’t justified by the Greek text. Power, love, and self control do indeed come from the Holy Spirit, but it is not the job of translators to tamper with the text in order to underline the meaning.

What this passage does is to emphasise that the Holy Spirit has come upon us, and has given us gifts. These gifts, however, are not ours to do with as we wish or choose. They are always God’s gifts, and in all that we do we must depend on Him. One of these gifts is self-control, which might also be translated “moderation”, and this is an important gift. If we are using dubious methods in our imagined service of the Gospel, we are ignoring that gift: we shall be, not merely useless servants, but destructive servants. The other requirement is faith, a trust in God’s grace, not our own efforts. As Habbakuk points out, God may appear to us to work slowly. We must accept that He IS working, and that He will achieve results in His own time, if we cooperate with Him—but not if we rely on our own gung-ho approach to people or to the world.

26th Sunday year C

26th Sunday 2022

Amos 6:1,4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

Where’s Lazarus? You may be familiar with “Where’s Wally?” a page which crops up in puzzle books in which Wally, a distinctive character in a red and white striped jumper and a red tam-o-shanter, has to be found among a crowd of people. Wally isn’t always easy to spot: Lazarus should be, because he pops up in so many guises in so many different people.

Lazarus is to be found in the refugee, who lies almost literally at our door, having made a perilous journey over land and sea, and probably having seen many of his companions die. He may be a man, a woman, or a child, and his arrival causes difficulties, but he is entitled to a compassionate and generous reception while decisions are made about him and, please God, in consultation with him.

The far right, with the connivance of certain politicians, would have us do what the rich man of the parable did not do, and actively ill treat him: we, on the other hand, must press for a just and compassionate response to his situation, and must seek to alleviate those conditions in his home land which caused him to set out on his journey.

We find Lazarus too in many citizens of developing countries, suffering as a result of unjust trading conditions and, as we are becoming increasingly aware, of the degradation of the planet, which impacts most on the poorer regions of the world.

He is found also closer to home, sleeping in our streets. Homelessness has many causes, some of which appear to defy solution, but the effort must be made. Whether we bawl to the sound of the harp and drink wine by the bowlful may be up to us, but I daresay that most of us sprawl on our divans at times, as Amos suggested. Either way, we cannot claim the excuse that the sprawlers and the bawlers, and the rich man of the parable may have claimed, that they didn’t know that Lazarus was there. We know about Lazarus: we cannot argue with the, probably mythical, Highland preacher who thundered from the pulpit, “It will be no use saying ‘But Lord, we didna ken’, because He will reply ‘Well, ye ken the noo’!”

Yet Lazarus also takes less obvious, more subtle forms. He may be the outsider in the neighbourhood, the workplace, the classroom, the parish, or even the family. I suspect that there was a Lazarus in every form or class at school, the kid who didn’t fit in; who attracted derision, dislike, even outright bullying. There was certainly one in my form: even if you didn’t pick on him, it was difficult to summon the courage to actively befriend him; much easier to ignore him, as the rich man ignored Lazarus.

And in the family, is there an awkward child, an unpopular aunt or uncle, a sibling banished to the margins, perhaps because of a dislike of his/her spouse or partner, or his/her lifestyle? This too is Lazarus, deserving of our notice, entitled to justice and love.

Many women would say today that they are Lazarus in the institutional Church. I would put in a claim for that endangered species, the working class Catholic of average education, for long the backbone of the Church in this country, but now largely ignored or despised, alienated from what is often called the chattering Church of the chattering classes, once active in the SVP or the UCM, but now adrift in the sea of study groups and parish programmes.

How do we respond to Lazarus? Charitable giving is important, but it is not enough. Action is needed. We must begin at home, by being aware of the needs and entitlement of those close to us, but then we must widen our horizons. Hands-on support for Lazarus in our midst is vital, but we must also work for justice on the larger scale. We may feel that the joining of campaigns, the lobbying of MPs is not our style, yet we do not have the right to do nothing, “ensconced snugly” wherever we may be. Lazarus is at our gate: on our response to him, says Jesus today, depends our eternal salvation.

25th Sunday Year C

25th Sunday 2022

Amos 8:4-7; 1Tim 2:1-8; Luke 16: 1-13

In 1996, in preparation for the following year’s General Election, the Bishops of England and Wales issued a document entitled “The Common Good”, to be distributed to all the parishes in those nations. It was a magnificent piece of work. It did not attempt to tell people for which party they should vote: instead, it set out some of the criteria on which they should base their choice.

These criteria were rooted, exactly as they should have been, in the Gospels and in Catholic Social Teaching. There was a move away from what had tended to be, and which still is in the United States, an almost exclusive emphasis on abortion, an emphasis which had proved misleading as, whatever party had been in power, the situation regarding abortion had remained unchanged.

Instead, there was a much broader reflection on, and call for, social justice, in which abortion continued to play a part, but in which there was a statement of, and indeed insistence on, an appropriate use of wealth, the rights of all people, and especially the poorest, both in this country and abroad, and a condemnation of what Pope Francis, almost two decades later, was to call “unbridled capitalism”, in the course of a denunciation which led to his being labelled a Marxist by elements in the USA. It should be pointed out that Francis was following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and that St.John Paul II, who was Pope in 1996, was equally determined in denouncing the excesses involved in the pursuit of money.

In this, the English bishops, and a long succession of Popes, were echoing Jesus’ demands in the Gospels. Today, we hear scathing comments from Our Lord about those who are slaves of money, accompanied by His, at first sight rather puzzling, parable of the dishonest steward, who is praised by his master because they are, in fact, two of a kind, the master as much of a rogue as the steward, both of them prisoners of money.

Our Lord Himself was very much in the tradition of the Jewish prophets. We have heard Amos, more than 700 years before Jesus, denouncing those who oppress the poor, cheating them and perpetuating their poverty. Thus we have an unbroken line from the prophets, through Our Lord, to twentieth and twenty first century bishops and Popes; and next week we shall learn what Our Lord meant by telling His disciples to use money to win them friends, as we shall hear the parable of the rich man, who should have used his money to befriend the poor man Lazarus.

1996’s document from the bishops was derided by the then editor of The Times, himself a Catholic and the father of a current cabinet minister, as being “economically illiterate”. Presumably, he would have considered Jesus to be economically illiterate too. Indeed, Our Lord seems to commend a degree of economic illiteracy to His followers, when He comments that “the children of this world are more astute when dealing with their own kind than are the children of light”. He is pointing out that money has an inbuilt tendency to corrupt its possessors, and that those who seek to acquire wealth will become less sympathetic to the needs of the poor.

Today, both this country and the world at large face massive financial crises, as people struggle with meteoric rises in the cost of living. Governments, including our own, have a responsibility to ensure that the basic needs of the poorest are met. The question is one, not of economic literacy, but of justice and compassion, just as was stated by the bishops a quarter of a century ago, as they sought to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and the prophets.

24th Sunday Year C

24th Sunday 2022

Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14; 1Tim 1:12-17; Luke 15: 1-32

I would like you, this morning, to travel back with me to January 1977. It followed on the heels of the long hot summer of ’76, when the fields were burned brown and, in parts of the country, there were bowsers and stand pipes to provide people with water.

January brought the other side of the coin, with thick snow blanketing the country. (For the benefit of younger generations I should explain that snow was white stuff which used to fall from the sky and lie on the ground—yes, honestly! Now, if it is seen, it is bottled and placed in a museum.)

This was within my first twelve months as a priest, and my first twelve months on the staff of Upholland College where, for my sins, I was put in charge of the First Years (aged 11/12) who, on a Monday afternoon, would combine with the Second Years for Games. Normally, this would have meant football, but as the pitches lay under a foot of snow, we went instead to a neighbouring golf course, where we spent the Games period sledging, chucking snowballs, and generally acting the maggot.

As darkness drew in, we headed back to the college for tea, and as we left the golf course, I pulled back my cuff to check the time, only to discover, to my utter horror, that my watch was missing. At some point during the previous hour, it had slipped off my wrist, and must now be lying, on the golf course, in the snow, on what was rapidly becoming a pitch dark evening.

I was totally dismayed. This wasn’t just any watch: it had been my 21st birthday present from my Mum and Dad, and to lose it was unimaginable: yet the unimaginable had happened.

It was a wretched evening and night that I spent. I bombarded St. Anthony with prayers, whilst all the time feeling that, even though St. Anthony, being my patron saint, is a good friend, it was asking perhaps too much of him to find a watch on a golf course in the snow.

Tuesday dawned bright and clear, and after a few more prayers I gave the First Years Latin class off, and took them on a watch hunt. They were in their element: no declensions or conjugations, but forty minutes in the fresh air (and the snow). I, on the other hand, was thoroughly wretched: it was a forlorn hope, and I was not surprised when I had to call off the expedition in order to prepare for the next lesson, with my watch undiscovered.

Hands in pockets, head down, I was trudging back to the college when footsteps came pounding behind me. “Father, Father, is this your watch?” When we had abandoned the search, little Bill Butterworth, who will now be in his late 50s, had stumbled over it, and there it was, still keeping perfect time, none the worse for its night in the snow.

I was jubilant, ecstatic, overwhelmed. I remembered to pour out my thanks to St. Anthony, and I gave the lads “prep off” that evening, which meant no “homework” for them, and arranged a trip out for them which probably cost me more than the financial value of the watch—but I didn’t care. To me, the watch was priceless, and recovering it one of the great events of my life.

Then, for the first time, I really grasped those great parables of forgiveness which we have just heard, and especially the second parable, in which a woman loses and then finds a coin. You see, I couldn’t understand why she made such a fuss about a coin, throwing a party which probably cost more than the newly recovered drachma.

All of a sudden, I understood perfectly. This was a special coin (I have heard it suggested that it may have formed part of her bridal headdress) whose value to her far exceeded its monetary worth. It meant the world to her, and she was more than happy to splash out on her party.

And that, says Our Lord, is how God behaves when someone gives Him the opportunity to forgive them. He has a party with the angels. I suspect that head banging, as a dance craze hadn’t arrived by 1977—this was, after all, the era of punk rock—but later experiences have given me the image of God and the angels head banging together, probably to the strains of 1979’s “Bat out of Hell”: jubilation on our part, but jubilation in God too.

23rd Sunday Year C

23rd Sunday 2022

Wisdom 9:13-18; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14: 25-33

Today’s Gospel is a bit of a tram-stopper. What do we make of it?

I think that the first thing to mention is that it is something of a hotch potch, cobbled together by Luke, or whoever was responsible for the final shape of his Gospel, from sayings dating from different times. Why do I say that? Because the two parables about the tower builder and the warlike king do not relate to the rest of the passage, despite efforts to fit them in, represented by the words translated as “and indeed” and “so, in the same way”.

Let’s leave these parables to one side for a moment and concentrate on the rest of what Jesus says. Bear in mind that He is speaking, not to His small group of disciples, but to the crowds who are following, who are drawn from the highways and byways, as He recently commented in one of His parables. He is, as it were, spelling out to the general public the requirements of discipleship.

What are they? Well, at first sight they seem to involve hating. Surely not? This is the Jesus who constantly emphasises the centrality of love: how can He be calling people to hate?

We have to remember that, despite our tendency to think otherwise, Jesus was not an Englishman:  He was a Palestinian Jew, a term which sounds like an oxymoron given today’s political situation in the Middle East. Consequently, He used the idioms of a Palestinian Jew, where “to hate” meant “not to cling to”, “not to be possessive of”, “to be willing to let go of”.

That becomes clearer when we do skip the intervening parables and move straight to the conclusion: “none of you can be my disciple without giving up all their possessions”. For once, the English translation expresses the meaning better than the original Greek. “Possessions” implies “possessiveness”, than which few things are more destructive. Once we become possessive, we actually become possessed, because the person or thing which we possess turns the tables and possesses us. We become obsessive, and therefore obsessed—literally “laid siege to”.

There is a false form of love, where the alleged lover attempts to control the object of his desire, to possess her body and soul, to direct her every movement: this is destructive of both parties and now constitutes a criminal offence named “control and coercion”. True love rejoices in the other person’s freedom, and therefore in one’s own, and amounts to the “hating”, of which Jesus speaks here.

So, are you and I willing to let go of people and of things, which can include such concepts as our own routine, our own way of doing things, our time and our space? If so, we shall be free to become disciples: if not, we will be trapped by the very things to which we cling.

This is where the two parables can be brought back into play. They can be seen as an invitation to consider the implications of discipleship. Am I willing to accept the call to follow, knowing that it will be difficult, demanding? Am I prepared to answer “Yes” to God, to open myself to Him, to say in effect “Whatever you want of me, I shall do” aware that it will be costly, though never destructive?

We need to ponder, though not indefinitely: we need to calculate, but not seeking total certainty, which we can never have. At some point, we have to accept the balance of probabilities and to say “Yes Lord, I think that this is what you are asking of me in this situation, at this stage in my life. Give me my particular cross, and let us get moving in faith and hope—and never forgetting charity”.

22nd Year C

22nd Sunday 2022

Sirach 3:17-20, 28-29; Hebrews 12: 18-19, 22-24; Luke 14: 1, 7-14

With your permission (or even without it, since I am going to do it anyway, as I am the one holding the conch (1) I would like to focus on the Second Reading. It is taken from the closing chapters of the Letter to the Hebrews, the author of which is unknown, and it summarises the situation of those who belong to God’s people, the Church.

From your schooldays, you may remember exam questions beginning “Compare and contrast”. That is what the author of this letter is doing today.

He recalls the self-revelation of God to the Israelites as described in the Book of Exodus. The Israelites are the original Church, the QAHAL, ekklesia in Greek, literally “those called out”, called out from among the nations, and called out from slavery in Egypt, to stand before the Lord.

At Mt. Sinai, God appeared to the Israelites in a way which terrified them, and which our writer describes: “a blazing fire, a gloom turning to total darkness, a storm, trumpeting thunder, the great voice speaking” which the people found unbearable. The appearance of God to the first Church, the people of Israel, overawed them.

That is not, the writer claims, how God appears to us, the new people of God. Yet, he insists, God does reveal Himself. As members of the new Israel, we too have God among us, truly present, though not yet revealed in all His glory. Whenever we gather as God’s people, as we have gathered this morning, God is with us, revealing Himself to us.

Because we have come together into the presence of God, we are gathered as were the Israelites at Mount Sinai; though the  Letter speaks no longer of Mount Sinai, a stage on the journey, but of Mount Zion, the new Jerusalem, our destination.

In other words, when we gather as the Church, we are in heaven, however unheavenly it may feel. This is the “already” and the “not yet” of which we shall be reminded constantly in Advent. The Kingdom of God is already present, though its fullness is not yet. We are already gathered at the banquet of the Messiah, though not yet in all its richness. We are in the company of the saints, though not yet in glory.

The writer to the Hebrews is speaking in eschatological terms, eschatology being literally “the study of the Last Things”. What we have here is “realised eschatology”, the study of the Last Things already present, though in embryo. The angels and the saints are here with us, though we do not see them; they are represented, to our senses, by the people around us, our fellow members of the Church, our fellow saints, as St. Paul puts it in his letters.

Take a moment to look around you, and to realise that the people you see are saints: and if you are thinking “well, they don’t look like saints”, remember that they are looking at you, and thinking the same. Realise too that, here with them, though invisible to us, are the “completed” saints, those “who have been made perfect”, as they are described, who have completed their purgation, their purgatory.     

Jesus too is present, the “mediator who brings a new covenant”, the covenant sealed in His blood, and renewed at the altar in every celebration of Mass, as “the blood of the new and eternal covenant” is made present for us.

For reasons known only to themselves, the compilers of the Lectionary have omitted the closing words of this passage, which recall that Jesus brings “a blood for purification which pleads more insistently than Abel’s”. As an old hymn which you may recall puts it: “Abel’s blood for vengeance  pleaded to the skies, but the blood of Jesus for our pardon cries,” (2) that blood which we receive even when, because of the pandemic, access to the chalice is restricted.

So, by gathering in this chapel, you are gathering in heaven. The latter is not yet complete for us, but in celebrating Mass we are receiving the promise of its complete fulfilment.

1.       See “The Lord of the Flies” by William Goulding.

2.       “Glory be to Jesus, who in bitter pains”.

21st Sunday Year C

21st Sunday 2022

Isaiah 66:18-21; Hebrews 12:5-7,11-13; Luke 13: 22-30

Right then, are today’s readings encouraging, discouraging, or a mixture of the two? We might regard the third option as the most likely, as that is how life seems to operate, as a mixture of good times and bad times, with the good often arising from and through the bad. Leaving aside for the moment the Mysteries of Light, it is no accident that the Rosary comprises joy, followed by sorrow, culminating in glory.

Let’s take a look at the individual readings. The first comes from the prophet generally known as Trito-Isaiah or Third Isaiah, the third contributor to the Book of Isaiah. The Jewish people have passed through the trauma of exile in Babylon, and are now re-established on their own soil. Yet difficulties remain. The return from exile hasn’t ushered in the perfect golden age for which the people had hoped. Life is still a struggle: enemies remain.

In this setting, the prophet sets out a clear message of encouragement. These enemies will become friends: God’s word will go out to the nations, who will in turn give their allegiance to Him, bringing their offerings to Him, being accepted among His people, and seeing ministers of the Lord selected from among their ranks.

If we step back, and look at this prophecy in the wider context of history, we can see how it has been fulfilled in the Church. After the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost, the disciples travelled throughout the known world, and have continued to do so during the two thousand years which have followed. Today we have a Pope from South America, a region undreamed of in the time of the apostles, and men and women from every nation on earth are servants of the one true God, even though, in many parts, huge attempts continue, to suppress knowledge and service of Him, China and North Korea being the clearest examples, though in the lifetime of many of us, communist regimes sought unsuccessfully to wipe out religion in many regions of the earth.

We have, then, clear encouragement from Trito-Isaiah, though it is accompanied by the realisation that both time and struggle are involved if his prophecies are to be fulfilled.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews presents us with a similar mixture of encouragement and discouragement, or rather of encouragement arising out of discouragement. We are sons and daughters of God—what could be more encouraging than that?—but that entails discipline, correction, even punishment; in other words, struggle and suffering. Yet the struggle and suffering must not discourage us, for they are the route to growth and, ultimately, to fulfilment.

Perhaps it is today’s Gospel which sets out most starkly the two elements of encouragement and discouragement. Our Lord echoes the prophet’s promise of the expansion of God’s people: “People from north and west, from east and south, will come to take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God.”

Yet this comes at a cost: some of those who have apparently belonged to God’s people will find themselves excluded from the Kingdom. Nor must we, or can we, comfort ourselves by imagining that this warning applies only to Jesus’ contemporaries among the Jewish people. His words are universal: all of us must attempt to enter by the narrow door.

What does this mean? It does not mean, as some have believed at different times in the Church’s history, and even in our own time, that we must put ourselves through excruciating penances, mortifying ourselves as it is sometimes called. Nor must we be scrupulous, picking up on each tiny fault of which we may or may not be guilty: that route leads to a morbid temperament, and a judgmental attitude to others.

Rather, what Our Lord calls for is a recognition of both our worth and our responsibilities as children of God. We are called to freedom, but freedom brings its own obligations. We must seek always to follow Jesus in love, living by the two great commandments of love of God and love of neighbour, accepting our share in the Cross, but recognising our sufferings as opportunities for growth, the Cross as the route to Resurrection.

I began by asking whether today’s readings are encouraging, discouraging, or a mixture of the two. In the last analysis, I would say that they are entirely encouraging, as even the apparent discouragements provide an opportunity for growth.

17th Sunday Year C

17th Sunday 2022

Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:12-24; Luke 11:1-13

Afficionados of Dr. Who may remember the Matt Smith episode entitled “The Doctor’s Wife” in which the Tardis, the Doctor’s time machine, takes on human form in the person of a woman called Idris. Immediately, she and the Doctor fall to bickering, with the latter complaining “You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go,” to which Idris/the Tardis retorts “I always took you where you needed to go”.

Can this shed some light on the vexed question of unanswered prayer? “Ask, and you shall receive” says Jesus, and I cannot be the only person who winces at that. I once met a lady who told me that she never asks for anything in prayer, but prays only “Thy will be done”; yet, although that undergirds all our prayer, Our Lord clearly tells us to ask, and we shouldn’t attempt to be more Christlike than Christ.

Yet we know that we don’t always receive what we ask for in prayer. Sometimes, that doesn’t affect us greatly. We are fully entitled to pray for a fine afternoon for the parish Summer Fair, but our faith is unlikely to be shaken if it pours with rain. (Mind you, as a child, I used to spend half the year praying for a fine Whit Monday for the Garstang procession and fairground, the highlight of my year, and the other half saying “thank you” prayers because the sun invariably shone. Since I stopped praying about it, I notice that they have suffered some miserably wet such Mondays.)

What, though do we make of those deeply serious prayers which apparently go unanswered? We pray for the recovery of a sick child, who nevertheless dies. Twice recently, I, along with a host of others, have prayed for falsely accused priests who yet have been convicted in the teeth of all the evidence. It is difficult to reconcile situations like that with Our Lord’s words.

In facing this question, we must be careful not to be glib. It is far too easy, it insults the person who has prayed, and it does God no favours to say “Ah, well, it was obviously better for that prayer not to be answered”. How dare we?

Yes, of course God sees the full picture of which we perceive only a tiny fragment. Yes, of course there are situations which, in the long term, are resolved positively, in spite of an apparent short term “No”. Yet there are prayers which are made with real fervour, where it is extremely difficult to perceive a positive long term outcome when they appear to be denied. What then?

Ultimately, I think that we are brought to Gethsemane. There, in the Garden of the Agony, Jesus asked His Father for something very reasonable and, from His point of view, almost definitely necessary: “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Yet it seems that the Father said “No”. Was this a case of a father giving his son a stone instead of bread, a snake in place of a fish, a scorpion for an egg?

Our Lord Himself was confident that it was not so, concluding His prayer with the words “Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it”. He knew that He faced suffering beyond all human imagining, yet He was willing to trust His Father to give Him the ultimate reward, the salvation of the human race. He was committed to complete faith in His Father. This was not faith in His own prayer, but faith in the person of the Father and in His total goodness.

That is the attitude which we must bring to our own prayers of petition—that God will take us, not always where we want to go, but always where we need to go. That does not excuse us, however, from storming heaven, not only on our own behalf, but also on behalf of others, nor does it give us permission to downplay their suffering, or to fob them off with easy answers. The answers are to be found only in the sufferings of the Redeemer, and it is not our business to attempt to give people simplistic or unreal comfort.

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16th Sunday Year C

16th Sunday 2022

 Genesis 18: 1-10; Colossians 1: 24-28; Luke 10:38-42

Drat, bother and confusticate it! Which reading(s) am I supposed to concentrate on today? As you probably know, the Old Testament reading at Mass is chosen to fit in with the Gospel, whilst the Second Reading takes a New Testament Epistle more or less from beginning to end, with no particular reference to the other readings.

Today’s problem is that both the Old Testament/Gospel combination and the New Testament Epistle are full of very rich material, but have no particular point of contact with each other. So about which should I woffle? I can only begin and see where the Holy Spirit takes me.

A very obvious theme running through both the Genesis passage and today’s Gospel is hospitality.  The First Letter of St. Peter, which is not included among today’s readings, instructs us to practise hospitality because, by doing so, “some people have entertained angels unawares”.

That is certainly the case with Abraham and Sarah. We are not told who their mysterious visitors are, but it is clear that they are, in some way, a manifestation of God. Indeed, because there are three of them, who at times seem to merge into one, some scholars have identified them with the Holy Trinity, and there is a famous icon which hints at that identity.

Whoever they may be, they (or He) reward Abraham’s hospitality by promising that the aged Sarah will have a son, a gift which surpasses both her understanding and her belief. In a very natural way, she will go on to giggle at this promise, and then pretend that she hasn’t. God alone knows the outcome of the hospitality which we practise, but we should heed the maxim of St. Benedict, who instructed his followers to welcome visitors “as Christ”.

Indeed, it is Christ in person who receives the hospitality of Martha and Mary. Now, if your mother was anything like mine, she will not have been happy with this particular Gospel passage.  “Why does Martha get criticised for getting on with her work, while Mary is praised for sitting on her backside? If Martha behaved like her, nothing would ever get done.”

Fair point, though slightly, I suspect, missing the nub. It is perhaps a case of horses for courses, or rather horses for starting times. Everything would indeed grind to a halt if Mary spent all her time on her backside, but at the moment that is what her guest wants. Martha is eager to show hospitality, but it is on her own terms. She is serving the Lord, but she hasn’t taken the trouble to discover how, at present, He wants to be served. He is not too bothered about pie and chips: at the moment, He wishes to spend quality time with His friends.

Later, Martha’s activity will be appropriate. When Jesus visits Lazarus’ tomb, Martha, by coming to greet Him, elicits from Him one of His  “I am” sayings—“I am the resurrection and the life”—and is able to make her own profession of faith: “ I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into the world”.

Activity and contemplation both have their time. As the Church, and as individuals, we need both. Activity without contemplation would risk missing its mark: contemplation without activity would be wasted. Each of us needs something of Mary, and something of Martha, within ourselves.

What though of the Second Reading? If I were to be asked to quote my favourite scripture passage, it would be taken from the beginning of today’s extract: “I rejoice to suffer for you as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up what has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of His body, the Church.”

Is that because I want to suffer? Is it heck as like! I fear and loathe suffering as much as anyone else does. Yet I know, as do you, that suffering is an inevitable part of life. If and when it occurs, there is massive encouragement (literally “putting heart in”) from knowing that it is a sharing in the sufferings of Christ; that it isn’t pointless, but is helping to save the world.

Finally, those of you who remember Bishop Brewer will recall that his motto was drawn from this passage. It was “Christus in vobis” which is here translated as “Christ is among you”. Fiery Jack used to stab the page and exclaim “Christus IN vobis—Christ IN you”.

Actually, both he and the translators were correct. “IN” in Latin (“EN” in Greek) can mean both “in” and “among”: in this instance, both are probably implied. Christ dwells in us, but He is also among us, in all His people, and in His world. We are on a winner both ways.

Enough of that! It has been a longer woffle this week, but it is done now.

15th Sunday year C

15th Sunday 2022

Deut 30:10-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37

Familiarity breeds contempt, or so we are told. It may certainly breed indifference, a sense of déjà vu, a clouding of the listening and thinking faculties. There are some Gospel passages which can affect us in this way, and I would suggest that today’s parable of the Good Samaritan is one of them. “Oh, right! The Good Samaritan! Know that one. (Did I leave the oven on?)”

Yet God’s word speaks to us anew every time we hear it. Consequently we have to examine this Gospel passage closely, to open our minds to what God is saying to us TODAY.

Firstly, it is worth pointing out that all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have accounts of Jesus being questioned about the Commandments. It was clearly an important issue for those who encountered Him. Why? Were they unsure of His orthodoxy, of whether He had the true faith?

In two of these accounts, Our Lord’s questioners are hostile. Both Luke and Matthew speak of a lawyer or a Pharisee “testing” Him, “seeking to disconcert Him”, as the Jerusalem Bible translation puts it. Only the scribe in St. Mark’s Gospel is without a hidden agenda, and becomes enthusiastic about His reply. How often today to people approach Jesus and His Church negatively, nit-picking, seeking to score points? If that is people’s approach, then we should be courteous in response, but not allow ourselves to be dragged into pointless discussions with those whose sole intention is to make mischief.

All the Gospels agree in having Jesus insist on the centrality of two commandments: firstly, love of God with all our ability; secondly, love of our neighbour as ourselves. That is not how the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, expresses it. The command to love our neighbour is taken from elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, from the Book of Leviticus, and it is not one of the Ten. It is clear from Our Lord’s teaching that we shouldn’t become entangled in the details of the Ten Commandments, but should focus on love of God and neighbour.

Only in St Luke is it the questioner, rather than Our Lord, who combines love of God and neighbour as the heart of the Law. Does this linking on the part of the lawyer indicate that it was already happening in Judaism, and that Jesus was expressing something which was already becoming understood among the Jewish people?

When we turn to the parable itself, we see that it is upside down: we need to stand on our heads to read it. In answer to the question “Who is my neighbour?”, we might have expected Jesus to reply that everyone is my neighbour, even the despised Samaritans, heretics as they were, and that Jews must love and help even them. That would have been shocking enough. It would have meant that people must love those who are hostile to them: that the people of Ukraine must somehow love the Russian invader; the Uighurs must somehow love the brutal elements in the Chinese government.

It does indicate all this, but it goes much further, depicting, not a generous Jew helping a Samaritan, but a Jew who is in need receiving help from a Samaritan. Thus, a Samaritan is held up as an example of how Jews, and everyone else, should behave, not a concept which Our Lord’s listeners would have found easy to accept. Not only are we required to love, as ourselves, those whom we might regard as outsiders, but we are to accept that their behaviour, their attitudes, their love, may be better than our own. Imagine in today’s world, a Hindu in India being told the parable of the Good Muslim, a Pakistani Muslim hearing the parable of the Good Hindu, Palestinians the parable of the Good Israeli, and vice versa.

This is a parable which demands, not only that, in showing love, we move out of our own comfort zone, but that, in receiving love, we must accept some unpalatable truths. All of this is demanded of us by God’s Commandments.

14th Sunday Year C

14th Sunday 2022

Isaiah 66: 10-14; Galatians 6: 8-14; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20.

“Ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to His harvest.” The word on which I would like to focus is “labourers”. As one of my duties as a Sixth Form tutor in the early days of my priesthood, I used to join the lads in what was known as “public work”.

It was timetabled on a Monday afternoon, and entailed anything from gardening to painting benches. I much preferred the latter: gardening has never been my forte and I tend to go by the motto “if in doubt, let it sprout”, though I would happily uproot such abominations as parsnips and broccoli, an invasive species if ever there was one.

Generally, the Sixth Form enjoyed their hour or so working in the open air or in the outhouses, though I recall one occasion when a colleague of mine, growing exasperated with one youth who was effectively skiving, admonished him rather tartly with the rebuke “The Lord wants labourers for His harvest, not fairies for the bottom of His garden”. I should point out, lest I be accused of homophobia, that this was purely a reference to his idleness, and carried no inference about his sexuality.

As Christians, we are called to labour, in our various ways, in the harvest. For consecrated religious, and for priests, the call takes on a particular urgency. Religious brothers and sisters have their own tasks. Of priests, it used to be said that they “don’t do very much, and they do it early in the morning”.

Some priests took umbrage at that, and would list all that the average priest does, as if he is uniquely hard-working and overstretched. I have never subscribed to that theory, or been impressed by that response. Admittedly, the priest is on call outside normal working hours, but so are many other people, not least the parents of young children, and to claim, as I have heard some do, that because of his supposed availability, a priest works a twenty four hour day, is unmitigated baloney.

What then should a priest be doing, if he is to be a genuine labourer in the harvest? The fashionable answer is “evangelisation”, coupled with the call to be a “missionary disciple”. I have to tread very carefully here, because I am aware that both expressions are used by Pope Francis, for whom I have not only loyalty but also an immense admiration. Nevertheless, if I am to be honest, I have to put my head above the parapet and say that I really don’t know what these expressions mean.

Am I, are you, expected to head out like the seventy two of today’s Gospel, walking through towns, knocking on doors, asking “Have you heard the Good News of the Lord Jesus?”? If so, I have to enter a nolle prosequi. I am neither willing nor able to do it. My brief experience of conducting parish missions showed me that, and I have long had a deep distrust, and indeed disgust, for those “evangelicals” who prowl the staircases and corridors of universities, spreading confusion, dismay, and a most un-Christlike form of Christianity.

Part of me is convinced that, with the greatest respect to the Holy Father, both “evangelisation” and “missionary disciples” are examples of those Crackerjack words of which the Church is inordinately fond.  (You may remember the children’s television programme “Crackerjack” in which the youthful audience had to shout “Crackerjack!” in unison whenever the word in question was mentioned.)

Holy Mother Church has, over the past half century, had a succession of such words: community, celebration, evangelisation, mission, and now evangelisation again and missionary disciples. I stand open to being convinced that these words actually mean something, and are not simply jargon and gobbledeygook, but no one has yet offered a convincing definition of any of them.

So we are brought back to the question “What are we supposed to do?” In search of an answer, I have to return to my original chosen word “labourers”. I do know what “labourers” means: it means “people who work”.

What then are we to work at? I would answer “Whatever God gives us to work at”. There are so many tasks under our noses: “all kinds of service to be done”, as St. Paul puts it. Perhaps the first thing is to pray for vision, that God may show us what to do here and now, and then to do it. I suspect that, if we are really serious in our prayer, God will give us enough tasks for a lifetime. Then perhaps we shall be able to consign the Crackerjack words to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, though not, I hope, to help grow parsnips or broccoli.

13th Sunday Year C

13th Sunday 2022

1 Kings 19:16, 19-21; Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9: 51-62

Forty years ago next month, I came to the end of my first posting as a priest and, a few weeks later, began my second. I had spent my first six years after ordination on the staff of the Junior Seminary at Upholland, and whilst I had serious doubts about the value of such an institution I, for the most part, greatly enjoyed my time there.

I was living in a community, as I had done for the previous eight years in a collegiate university and then a senior seminary; I had the challenge and enjoyment of working with young people; and I had opportunities for sport several times a week.

My second appointment could not have been more different. I was living with one other person, a very kind and supportive parish priest, and I was working as, effectively, a full time hospital chaplain. Instead of a settled community of young people, I had a transient population of the sick, the elderly, and the dying. My four or five days on which I could either play football or run in company with others, were replaced by a solitary run on a Sunday afternoon before I headed back to the hospital for a tea time Mass.

It was vital work. I no longer had any grounds for questioning the value of the setting in which I was occupied, but I have to admit that I was homesick for Upholland. The solitary nature of the work was a massive change from all that I had been used to, and the transition from my former clientele to the new demanded a huge mental adjustment. There were times when I would sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament with the words of today’s Gospel running in my head: “once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God”. I had laid my hand on the plough, and I had to follow the furrow.

Bizarrely, my second appointment lasted only three and a half months, before I was given a third. This involved moving to London as a member of the Catholic Missionary Society, delivering parish missions in various parts of the country.

If hospital chaplaincy required time for adjustment, the CMS was, for someone of my temperament, a living hell. Knocking on the doors of total strangers fifty times a day reduced me, if not to a gibbering wreck, then at least to a deeply depressed individual. After four missions, Bishop Foley took the compassionate decision to recall me to the Diocese, and I embarked on my fourth appointment, as assistant priest at St. Mary’s Morecambe, and chaplain to Our Lady’s HS, Lancaster, a dual role which proved to be, perhaps, the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.

What, though, of laying the hand on the plough? What of following the Jesus who “set His face toward Jerusalem”, almost as if He was gritting His teeth to face the ultimate journey?

To be fair to myself, I don’t think that I had taken my hand off the plough, and if I was looking anywhere it was forward, not back. Our Lord calls us to follow Him along the road, to carry the Cross, but He did not intimate that the journey should be totally devoid of light and joy. I mention this, not to provide an Apologia for my own conduct, but to suggest that if ANYONE is in a situation which is damaging them, the Lord does not demand that they remain in it. He is critical of would-be disciples who look for excuses to delay following Him: He does not insist that their discipleship be a source of misery.

All of us are called to follow, but our following, though it may entail the Cross, is intended to fulfil our personalities, not to stunt them. We are called, not to unlimited beer and skittles, admittedly, but nonetheless to joy in the Lord.