Rite of Entry 16 December 2007

Homily for Advent III 16 December 2007 Sitting at the front of our church today we have a group of people who have been attending our weekly course of instruction in the Catholic Faith with the aspiration of joining the Church and becoming fully one with us and with Our Lord next Easter. Shortly they will be coming forward to make the first public act that signifies their commitment to this process of discernment and growth, in the Rite of Entry, when they will be formally accepted as catechumens or as candidates, if they are already baptised. You are a great sign of hope for us all and a proof that the Church is constantly renewing herself with new blood, and we welcome you. This Gospel today is very appropriate for you, because of the question that Jesus puts three times in slightly different forms- “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” Now, the wilderness, the desert in other words, is often used in the Bible to mean a place where you go to grow and to learn, to be purified and to become holy, often as a preparation for some special task or vocation. You too have gone out into the wilderness, you have left the cares and commitments of your busy lives each week to come to St Saviour’s and to find out about our Catholic Faith and how to align yourselves more completely with Our Lord by entering the Church which he founded. And so, you can answer that question that Our Lord teases the crowd with in this passage- “What did you go out to see?” And also you can answer the question John the Baptist sends his messengers to ask Jesus- “Are you the one who is to come or have we got to wait for someone else?” You came week by week, not just for the company, although we get to know each other and support each other and sometimes become friends; not just for the intellectual stimulation of finding out about our religion, although the joy of studying and thinking is there and we certainly have to use our minds to appreciate our faith; not ultimately for any other reason but to follow Jesus, to sense his presence in our midst, to prepare to meet him more fully in the sacramental life that awaits you, and to deepen your awareness of Our Lord Jesus, so that it can develop into friendship and into love. “What did you go out to see?” Why, on these cold and dark nights, have you set out after your day’s work, left your cosy fireside, roused yourself from that armchair and switched off the TV and made your weary way to the presbytery? You dear good people, you have done this to follow Jesus, in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit has given you, that the best and surest way of following him is in his Church. God will reward you! Having realised who Jesus is, we face immediately the other question- what does he want of me? what does he want me to do? Our Faith must be translated into action! Love that is only words is not much good, is it! Jesus, in the echo of the passage from Isaiah we heard as our first reading, gives us the programme as he describes the miracles he is doing that prove he is the Messiah and that he is ushering in the Messianic Age, the reign of justice, peace and concord, the start of that ideal world that we all long for. He tells the messengers to go back to John the Baptist and tell him “the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life”. Now we are all attempting in the Christian life to make our lives more and more like Our Lord’s- the Holy Father, speaking on the recent Feast of the Immaculate Conception, says “we will be judged on our similarity to Jesus.” So can we be like Jesus, can we do what Jesus did? Well, you may be saying, how can I do any of that? I can’t cure the sick or raise the dead. I certainly have no such powers! But let us just think for a moment about what we might try to do- we can’t change the word single-handed, we can’t bring about a revolution, but we can do something every day to change our corner of the world, we can start in our own backyard. We may know people who have been blinded, dazzled by what Pope Benedict called last week “messages that offer false models of happiness” and “the dead-end roads of consumerism” – can we show them the reality of God’s love and where true contentment lies? We may know people who are lame, lame ducks, whose lives have got into a mess for all sorts of reasons- can we lend them a hand, offer them some practical help and advice? And the lepers, the outcasts of society, the people other people steer clear of, can we approach them and let them see that there do exist people whose minds are not clouded with prejudice and offer them a neighbourly greeting? And as for the deaf- Fr Chris recently spoke of “the lullaby of materialism”, that drowns out all other voices and deafens us. Can we counter that with a broadcast of our own, with a message of the unselfishness that is at the heart of the Christian life? If we can do these things, witnessing to our Catholic Faith day by day to those around us, in our street and workplace, by our kindness and openness, what the Pope calls being “united in the task of building a more just, supportive and peaceful world”, then indeed we shall see the dead raised to life, we shall see people given new life, new hope, new confidence, a new dignity as sons and daughters of our heavenly Father. May our love for Our Lord Jesus Christ cause us to grow more and more like him, whom the Pope has called “the standard God gave humanity to live by” and may the example of our lives help those around us to answer that question “What did you go out to see?” Amen.

Brussels pilgrimage

Homily preached in the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels 7 December 2007 Here we are in Brussels, in this vast church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion dear to so many of us at St Saviour’s. As you know, this great church took an extremely long time to build, the first stone being laid in 1905 and the last in 1970- and what events, what dramas had taken place in that time between the start and the finish of this colossal undertaking! It was a very different world in 1970 from that tranquil world of a hundred years ago, a world that was forever swept away in 1914. And not only was the world completely different, but the church, the finished edifice, imposing as it is, came in the end to bear very little resemblance to the first ideas of those who laid out the original foundations- we have ended up with a beautiful and holy place, but it is far from how the people who began the work imagined it would look. I suppose our lives are like that. How surprised we would all be if, when we stood on the threshold of adult life in our teens and first began to imagine what kind of life we might like to fashion for ourselves, we could have done a sort of fast-forward to today, and seen ourselves in our later life- very few of us, I imagine, have been able to stick faithfully to the blueprint we had sketched out at the start of our lives, we have probably had to have a few rethinks, rubbing out a bit here and there which no longer seemed appropriate or possible, having perhaps to demolish a bit that no longer worked or was what we wanted. Probably also a few changes have been forced on us, there have been unexpected developments, surprises, shocks perhaps, that we have had to muddle through as best we can and try to make something of. But in the end, although we are not exactly- or not at all- what we thought we might be, I imagine that on a good day we can look at ourselves with something like approval and say with the poet Tennyson “That which we are, we are”. But actually, of course, it can only be a good thing that we have not been trapped in a rigid plan, a self-centred vision of ourselves that dates from a time before we had acquired much in the way of maturity. Change is growth, and in the changes of our lives we will have grown- Cardinal Newman, whom I rarely quote because I don’t really get on with him, said “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often”. We are all, as Christians, trying to align our lives ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, and that is a lifelong task that we are engaged in, and it requires a readiness to be constantly making a few adjustments to the plans, to be doing that fine tuning of our souls. We need to develop a habit of introspection- not an unhealthy obsession with ourselves, but a habit of reflecting prayerfully on our daily lives, a habit that will of course inevitably involve us coming frequently to lay our findings before Our Lord in the Sacrament of Confession, and entrusting ourselves, and the lives we are trying to make and make sense of, to Our Lord’s infinite mercy, to his Sacred Heart. If we are adapting ourselves little by little to Our Lord, as we come to appreciate more and more what he wants us to be, what we could be at our best, then our lives will be what this great church was for so many years, a work in progress. St Philip, whom I do get on with, used to say “nulla dies sine linea”, no day without a touch- and so, if we have had a retouch here and there, a rethink now and then, it may be, please God, that at the end of our earthly lives we shall realise that what we have achieved with our lives is a magnificent edifice, a Shrine, like this, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus is at home. Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, Touch our hearts, and make them like thine own. Amen.

33rs Sunday of the Year C 18 November 2007

Homily for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 18 November 2007

These readings today which we have just heard seem to refer in their various ways to the end of the world, and one of their messages is, how fruitless and futile it is to speculate on when and how this may come about. St Paul is very down to earth in his letter to his converts in Thessaloniki, telling them to put their minds and their energies into living now, rather than into worrying about some possible cataclysmic event in the future- he says they should “go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat”- that is, being productive members of the Church and of society. And Our Lord too speaks in similar vein, when, at the end of his rather grim predictions of what life will be like for his followers in the years leading up to the destruction of the Temple, he ends by saying “your endurance will win you your lives”. We are being told today in our Scripture readings to “go on quietly working” and to endure, to stick at our Christian vocation.
I have said before that although we cannot be sure about when the end of the world will come, we can be quite sure about one thing, that the world will end for us, that one day my world will end, that I will one day die and be here no more. What awaits us beyond the grave? And how can we prepare for it? To try to answer those important questions I want to use the wise words of two of our greatest saints.
St Thérèse of Lisieux knew for a long time that she was terminally ill and reflected a great deal, especially in her last months, on what the after-life would involve. In one of her prayers she uses a memorable phrase, when she speaks of eternal life as being like a constant conversation we will be holding with Our Lord, caught up, as she puts it, in an eternal face-to-face. We shall see Our Lord face to face, and be held by his loving gaze. It will be like two lovers meeting who have been apart for a long time, the sort of meeting you might see at a railway station or an airport, when they run to embrace each other at the barrier, and in the intensity of their emotions have no words to say, they just are lost in looking at the one they love. St Thérèse says that once all the things that get in the way of our loving Our Lord have vanished, what she calls the shadows, that is to say, all the passions and desires we have for material things, for the things of this world, the things that so easily cloud our vision and sidetrack our thoughts, once all that has gone, we shall be able to concentrate on our love, the love that we always knew was there, the love that we sometimes glimpsed in ourselves, the love we have for Our Lord- then, she says, “I will be able to talk to you of my love in an eternal face-to-face” –“vous redire mon Amour dans un Face à Face éternel!” In death she imagines that her soul will “throw itself….into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love”.
Now we are not, I suspect, Christians of the stature of St Thérèse! We may be thinking, how far we are from feeling ready to throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus in this way. The whole idea of an encounter at this level of intimacy with God may seem quite beyond us, may be making us squirm and feel very uncomfortable. How can we ever hope to approach death with that kind of confidence? Well, now I turn to another great favourite of mine, St Augustine! Only this week I read this, from one of the sermons he gave to his congregation in North Africa all those centuries ago: “Let us choose every day to know who we really are in case, while we are without a care in the world, the Day arrives at last, and, of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real.” Let us think about that a minute. St Augustine is saying that the only way to be ready for death when it comes, the Day with a capital D, our D-Day that will finally liberate us from this world and the tyranny of sin, the only way to prepare for death is to be real now - not to hide behind falsehoods, a false perhaps rose-tinted view of ourselves, not to start to believe all the half truths about ourselves that we often present to the outside world, you know what I mean, the version of events that we put across when we describe ourselves to new people when we meet them, that ensures they think well of us- no, hard though it is, St Augustine recommends that the best thing, the safest course in the long run, is for us to stick to the truth about ourselves, to deal with the realities of who we really are and what our lives are really like. This is, I think, what the endurance Jesus speaks of means- if we can hold on through our lives to a version of ourselves that is more or less accurate, that if our version of who we think we are isn’t that too far from God’s version of who we are, then we will be in with a chance, and then our meeting with Our Lord at the end of our lives will not be too painful, too awkward to contemplate. If we have faced up to the truth, we will find we can face the one who said “I am the Truth”. God forbid that we die believing in all our fantasies, and so adrift from the reality of our lives and our true selves that “of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real”.
I have wandered far from our texts, but I hope you see the link I am trying to make- that our big chance for eternal happiness lies in our living now, “going quietly on” as St Paul says, embedded in the reality of who we really are. Help us, Lord Jesus, to be among those whose endurance will win them their lives, so that on the Last day we may stand with confidence before you, the Son of Man, and spend our eternity with you, telling you our love face to face. Amen.

Homily for 29th Sunday Year C

Homily for twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 21 October 2007 Today’s readings are about prayer and the importance of prayer, the necessity for us to be constant in prayer, to persevere with our life of prayer. It is always daunting to talk or preach about prayer, partly because so much drivel, so much confusing stuff, has been written on the subject, and I am sure that some of you are already switching off! The trouble is, that prayer has become associated in the minds of many of us with something complicated and rather special, something perhaps best left to the experts, and there are so many books about prayer that with all their talk of meditation, contemplation, and other rather technical terms, can completely put us off and make us think “This is not for me”. It reminds me in a way of all the mystique and snobbery that surrounds the whole business of wine and wine drinking, especially in this country. People not used to drinking wine feel completely out of their depth when some snooty waiter in a restaurant hands them a wine list the size of a photograph album, and then there’s all that palaver about good years and bad, and people claiming they can tell which slopes a certain vintage was grown on, how can anyone compete with that kind of expertise? On TV programmes about food and wine you get presenters going through a whole rigmarole of sniffing and swishing the wine around in their glass before actually tasting it and saying “Yes- I can taste blackberries, chocolate, a hint of boot polish….” All complete nonsense of course! All you actually need to know about wine is, do I like what I am drinking? If so, try to remember what it’s called and buy it again next time. There are a few easy rules, like the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) and red wine goes with red meat, and, as that great cookery book of the 1960s, “Cooking in a Bedsitter”, said, white wine goes with carpets. You can get along very easily with just a few basic rules of thumb like this and just by trying things out for yourself. Don’t be afraid, just go ahead, have a go, taste and see. Well, that’s enough about wine- I don’t want you to think I am getting obsessed! But do you see my point- forget all the stuff that’s written about wine and just get on with it and enjoy it. Prayer is exactly the same- forget all the stuff that’s written about prayer, the levels and stages of prayer, St So-and-so’s method of prayer, the nine days of this prayer, the hundred days of that, don’t be side-tracked by any of all that. Prayer is not a specialist subject to answer questions on in a quiz programme! Prayer is something easy and straightforward that all of us, however ordinary a Catholic we may feel ourselves to be, has the ability, the right and the duty to engage in. So what is prayer? Well, in essence it is simple a conversation with God. St John Chrysostom, the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, says “Prayer is the supreme good, the familiar conversation with God. It is a relationship with God and a union with him”. You see, we as Christians are called upon to develop a relationship with God, that is what the Christian life is, an on-going and ever–deepening friendship we are trying to have with Our Lord. And how can we have a relationship with someone if we don’t talk to them? We have got to be on good terms with God, and that means at the very least being on speaking terms with him! And so we talk to God, that is what prayer is. We can use other people’s words, the words the Church uses, like the Our Father and the Hail Mary, or we can use our own words, just spilling things out to God, telling him what is on our minds right now. We don’t need to find special words to do that, we don’t need to feel awkward because we haven’t got the right churchy language to put it all in, we can just talk to him as we would talk on our mobiles to a friend we want to keep up to date with our life in all its as pects. And that is important too, we don’t have to clean up our act to talk to God, we don’t have to leave out all the messy bits that won’t sound too good- God knows us inside out, so we don’t need to hold anything back for fear of spoiling the impression; we need to give him the truth, the truth of our joys and sorrows, our anxieties and so on. As we would to a best friend. Of course conversation ideally is a two-way traffic. You won’t have much of a relationship with someone if you do all the talking and you never listen to what the other person is trying to say! So too in prayer: we have to let God get a word in edgeways. How does God speak to us then? Well, principally in the words of Scripture, when we listen attentively to the readings at Mass, when we read portions of Scripture every day in our private devotions- either using the Divine Office, if we like to join in the great prayer of the Church that is always rising from the four corners of the world, or in the excellent Bible reading notes that Melina and Connie sell in our shop. Very often as we read a phrase will just stand out, a sentence will pop up before our eyes, full of meaning for us in our particular situation that day. And God also speaks to us in silence, especially if we come and keep him company by praying before the Blessed Sacrament- in the stillness there Our Lord can drop a word into our minds. The main thing I want to stress this morning, apart from how easy and uncomplicated it actually is to pray, to talk to God, is that this must not be just a sporadic activity on our part, something we only do when we’re feeling in the mood, when a special holy feeling comes over us. I don’t get those holy feelings very often- and that feeling may never come! St John Chrysostom again: he says “Prayer is not confined to set hours or moments, it is in continual activity”. We must keep that life-giving conversation with God going at all times, when we feel like it and when we don’t, for without that conversation our relationship with Our Lord will wither and we will never become the close friends that he wants us to be, and that in our better moments we also desire. We must persevere, we must be like Moses, praying all through the long day and the heat of the battle. Our arms may well grow heavy as we keep them outstretched in prayer, but we can be like Moses and get help to ensure that we persevere – he had Aaron and Hur who came and held his arms up when he grew tired, and we can call on Our Blessed Lady and the Saints to come to our aid too, and join their prayers to ours. May we persevere in our relationship with Our Lord, may we keep our arms outstretched to Heaven in our life-long conversation of prayer, and may the help of Our Blessed Mother ensure that our arms remain firm until sunset. Amen.

Homily on my return from pilgrimage 16 September 2007

Homily for Twentyfourth Sunday In Ordinary Time Year C 16 Sept 2007 I am just back from escorting a parish from Brentwood diocese round Portugal, and Fr Chris is back from his annual leave in Ireland, and I guess during the summer, if such we can call it, many of you have also been away. In France this time of year, early September, is known as “la rentrée”, the coming back, the coming home, because this is the time of year when we come back- the children go back to school, and we return to our routines, to our normal life. There is a saying, isn’t there, that weekdays are fact and weekends are fiction, and that is certainly true of the holiday season, which in England used to be called by the press the silly season, when because everyone was away and everything was shut down, the only news the papers had to print was trivial stuff. So perhaps we have been away, and indulged in holiday mood in what we might call fiction- we feel different, we may even look different, wearing our holiday clothes, our resort wear- or, as a friend of mine said when he saw some brightly coloured shorts I was planning to take to Turkey, our last resort wear. We go to different places, do different things, perhaps do uncharacteristic things, things we wouldn’t normally think of doing at home- we feel somehow liberated from the constraints of our ordinary lives, because we are away, we are on holiday, and often, in a sense, we are on holiday from ourselves. These experiences, these adventures, are all very well, perhaps a necessary letting off steam for us- perhaps we feel it is good for us to kick over the traces once in a while. Perhaps it is. But there is a danger in fooling ourselves into thinking that the fiction that we create on holiday is, or could become, fact. It must remain an escape, and be recognised as such, and we must accept the fact of our lives, of our real selves, which is greater than any fiction, than any fantasy, and return to them, because it is in the reality of our daily lives, in the very ordinariness of our ordinary lives, in the humdrum of our routines, that God is waiting to encounter us- not in the fantasies, not in the escapism of the emotional highs, but in our true selves, in our day to day existence. This is what the prophet Jeremiah means when he says “The heights are a delusion, and the orgies of the mountains also”, a phrase I came across in the breviary some weeks ago and which I cannot get out of my mind. Not in the highs of escapism, but in the plains of our down to earth lives will we find truth, and the God who is Truth. Look at today’s Gospel. Today the Church gives us a second chance this year to reflect on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son tires of his life, and goes off to have a permanent holiday from it, he exchanges fact for fiction, and lives out his fantasies to the full. And what happens? He finds at the end of the day that all he has left in his hands are husks, things of no substance, and he is desperately, supernaturally hungry, because all the fun of the fair has not been able to satisfy him and he ruefully recognises the sheer emptiness of all the pleasures he has been chasing after. What does he do? He returns! He comes home! And once he is on the path of return, what does he find? He has been rather grimly gritting his teeth about his homecoming, rehearsing a speech he is going to make, of abject apology, and being ready for life to be much harder than it was before, recognising he is no longer worthy to be called his father’s son, but actually it is not going to turn out like that at all- the Father is there, coming to meet him on his way, welcoming him with open arms, and giving him back all his former status as the beloved son. This is what we will find, please God, this autumn, as we return to our routines and the calendar moves inexorably on, with our old commitments and responsibilities making their claims on us afresh- it will be in the normality of things, “back in our own backyard” as Byng Crosby (I think) used to sing, that we will find Our Lord waiting for us. The return to ordinary life, the picking up again of our old familiar ways, will not be a thing to be afraid of or resentful about, for if we approach our lives in the right spirit, we will find that God is there and God will reward us and make our burden light. Are we the returning prodigal son? We may, some of us, baulk at identifying with that wayward young man, we may be thinking “Well, that’s all very well, but I haven’t escaped ever, I’ve just been soldiering on, and very hard work it’s been”. In that case perhaps we are rather like the other son, who is so annoyed at all the fuss when his brother suddenly turns up again, and who remonstrates with the father: “Look, all these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed your orders!” He clearly has got just as fed up with the day to day drudgery of life on the farm as his brother had. And our daily routines and our ordinary lives can indeed seem a drudgery, a treadmill, grinding us down. If we see the Christian life as obeying orders, if we see ourselves as slaves, with no say or interest in what’s happening around us, then of course we will be fed up, and we will go a bit sour and resentful, like this other son. Alas, we can all think of people who have been turned sour by religion, who have kept all the rules and ended up bitter and twisted. We must keep the rules out of love, not out of fear, we must follow loyally the teachings of the Church not because we have no choice but because that is our desire, what we do to show our love for Our Lord, Our Lord who said “I do not call you slaves any more, but friends”. Lord Jesus, accept us as we return to you; come and find us in our ordinary lives, and let us find in our daily routines a hundred ways to serve and please you, for the heights are a delusion and we need the truth, the truth of our lives, if we are to know you who are the Truth. Run to us, clasp us in your arms at this Mass and kiss us tenderly as we receive you in Holy Communion. Amen.

Pilgrimage to Portugal

Homily for Our Lady of Sorrows 15 September 2007 delivered in Oporto Cathedral Today’s Liturgy shows us how close to her beloved Son Our Lady was, and how that closeness, that total identification, meant that his pain became her pain. That is a terrible phrase, a piece of psychobabble we hear all the time, but the parents among you, especially perhaps the mothers here, will know the truth of it- how you go through all the turmoils of your children’s lives with them. Closeness to people eventually means that we become like them, we take on some of our friends’ ways, their speech and turns of phrase, even perhaps their opinions. And when we look at that special form of friendship that is marriage, we all know married people who have grown so together that they always know what each other is thinking, what they’re going to say before they say it, and so on. That is why it is very important for us to choose our friends well, because they will influence us. Parents know this very well, that is why they are always so anxious about their children’s friends, especially in the teenage years, when children can become such copycats! As you know, I worked in the East End of London for many years with delinquent teenagers and their families, and one of the first questions I would always ask when I first met a youngster in trouble was “Who are your friends?” In German there is a saying, “Mitgegangen, mitgehangen”, which means, the people you hang around with will get you hanged. So who are our friends then? Well on our pilgrimage this week we have made a deliberate effort to come close to some really major saints, those closest in life to Our Lord. We went to Compostela to get to know St James, to acquire some kind of intimacy with one of the disciples- Peter, James and John- who was always in Our Lord’s inner circle, one of his special friends, one to whom he gave special insights. Then yesterday we journeyed to Fatima, to Our Lady, to draw close to Our Blessed Mother, the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of us all, the person who was and is closest of all to Jesus, who always has his listening ear. Can we let them influence us? I think we should. Let us be a bit rash in our love for Our Lord, like St James- when Jesus said to him “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”, even though he didn’t really know what that meant, nevertheless, he said straightaway “Yes, we can!” We want to have some of that enthusiasm of St James too, that is why we hugged him at Compostela, we want to be one with him and make the same kind of enthusiastic offering of ourselves to Our Lord. And as for Our Lady- do you remember the Gospel reading we had the other day, when the angel appears to Joseph and says “Do not be afraid to take Mary to your home”? Well, that is a message for us- we must not be afraid to take Mary with us to our homes as we return to them this evening. May each one of us have no fear, and be willing and happy to take Mary to our home. Let us make the saints our friends and let our intimacy with them influence us, change our lives and bring us ever closer to our Blessed Lord. Amen.

Twentieth Sunday of Year C 19 August 2007

Photo taken at Pentecost of James (in the red dalmatic) congratulating one of the ten converts received at mass that day.

Homily for Twentieth Sunday in Year C 19 August 2007 This is one of those uncomfortable Gospel readings, especially if we like to think of Jesus as meek and mild, or if we are like the person who accosted me on the 484 the other day to tell me that she had several problems with the Church but not with Jesus because after all, he was a modern man who got on with everybody. Today’s Gospel reminds us very clearly just how demanding Jesus will be if we embark on a relationship with him. It will inevitably shake us up and cause friction, conflict even, at some point in our lives. Jesus says to the disciples quite bluntly, “Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” And he explains why: “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!” What is this fire he is talking about? We must be clear first of all that he is not talking about the fire of hell or the fire of punishment- we do not believe in a God who is rubbing his hands with glee saying “Now they’re for it, I’ve had enough now, I’m really going to punish them this time!” We on the contrary believe in a God who never tires of us, whatever we get up to. This symbol of fire that Jesus uses is the fire that is the awe-inspiring presence of God, the close awareness of God. This comes from the Old Testament of course, and first of all from the encounter that Moses has with God on Mt Sinai in Exodus 3. There we read that God appeared to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed”. And God calls to Moses out of the flames and reveals to him his name, “I am who I am”, he reveals to him something of his nature, of his very essence, exactly what kind of God he is. And then later, when Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness there was a pillar of cloud, that turned at night into a pillar of fire, which stayed with them and which signified to them the continuing presence of God in all their wanderings and troubles, and which acted as their guide as we read in Numbers 9. The pillar of fire guided them all the time, they were constantly aware of it. The Fathers of the Early Church all agree that this fire that guides the Israelites is in fact the Holy Spirit, and of course this reminds us straightaway of the birth of the Church at Pentecost, when St Luke describes the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles with the words “and there appeared unto them tongues as of fire….resting on each one of them”. So what Jesus is fervently wishing for the world is not that there should be some ghastly punishment, but that there should be a new awareness of God, a new closeness of people’s lives to God’s will, all over the earth. And how he wishes that this sense of the reality, the immediacy of God, would set people ablaze with a new enthusiasm for living the sort of life that God wants us to live. Fire is a potent symbol- it stands for warmth and light, indeed our ancestors in their caves only began the long march towards civilisation when they discovered fire and all its properties. It also stands for purefying- in the heat of the fire impurities drop away and in the heat of autoclaves surgical implements become sterile and fit for use in the operating theatre. And it stands for moulding and recreating- in intense heat sand is turned by glass-blowers into glass, and once they are melted by the heat metals can be poured into moulds and take on new shapes and new uses. All of these ideas resonate with us, don’t they, as we think about what a close encounter with God would involve, and what changes it would start off in us. If we let it, that is. Because of course the other thing about fire that has to be borne in mind is, that it is dangerous! So too it is dangerous to get close to God- Moses, we read, “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God”. It is a risk, because God is a lover, he is the best of lovers, and like all lovers, he is demanding. Or perhaps, to put it another way, when we begin to realise more and more of the nature of God, we will see with increasing clarity the things in our lives that are out of place, that jar, that must sooner or later go- our love for God will cause us to make demands on ourselves. And we will change, the fire of love will change us, and we will come to desire that change, because nothing less will satisfy us in our ambition to be close to God. And then of course we will discover that not everyone in our life, be it in the family circle or in the workplace or wherever, will be comfortable with the change that they see in us. For our newly kindled awareness of God in our fellow men and women may cause us to speak out against unfairness and injustice in a way we haven’t bothered or dared to before; our new knowledge of God may cause us to see the wrong thinking that lies behind some of our country’s laws and find us having to stand up for the Church’s teaching in a more open way than we have been inclined to before- we may in other words find that we have to stand up and be counted! We will no longer be content just to relax and go with the flow of our society, because we will be resting in the Lord and going with the flow of the Holy Spirit. Jesus knows this very well, which is why he is carefully warning his disciples of the cost of discipleship in this reading- “the father divided against the son” and so on. For it is in the crucible, in the fire of a real encounter with God, in the heat of the moment, so to say, that we see what God requires of us and how much must be burnt away before we can be poured into the mould he has prepared for us. The risks are great, but the rewards are even greater! This morning we approach the God who lives in the burning bush, which is the tabernacle, the God whose presence never leaves his faithful people, the God who, giving himself to be consumed by us in every Mass, is nevertheless never consumed. As we receive Our Lord in Holy Communion today, let us ask make this our prayer: Lord Jesus, enkindle in us the fire of your love, the fire of the awareness of what you wish to do in our lives. Amen.

Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007

Homily for the Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007 Many years ago I was teaching at a Church of England school for girls in Westminster, where the Headmistress was a formidable woman, Dorothy Stephenson- it had been a grammar school in its heyday, and the saying was that it wasn’t anymore but no-one had dared tell the Head. She used to give little sermons at morning assembly and I remember one feast of Our Lady when she began like this: “Now the Virgin Mary was a young girl, not much older than some of you, but there was one big difference”- and she fixed the girls with a hard stare at this point- “she was obedient!” The Virgin Mary is indeed like us, a human being like us, but there is a difference, and Miss Stephenson was not so far wrong in her view of what that difference consisted of. We know what it was, essentially, and we remind ourselves of the difference every time we say the Hail Mary, when we call on Our Lady and say “Hail Mary, full of grace”. Our Lady was full of grace. Now the text of the first part of the Hail Mary comes as you know from St Luke’s Gospel, the greeting that the angel Gabriel gives to Our Lady, sometimes translated as “full of grace”, sometimes as “highly favoured one”. The Greek word is very important, it is kecharitomene, and actually this is not an adjective, “full”, it is a passive, and literally means “the one who has been filled up, or if you like, the one who has allowed herself to be filled right up to the brim with grace. She is completely filled with the grace of God, so that there is no corner of her life that is not covered by it, there is no area which she has reserved to herself- and hence, of course, no room for any sin, no possibility for God’s will for her to be blocked in any way. She herself acknowledges this when she says to the angel “let it be to me according to your word”. That is where the difference between us and Our Lady lies- we all receive grace from God, grace to enable us to respond to his will for us, but, unlike Our Lady, we restrict the action of that grace in our lives. We hold back bits of ourselves from God, we want to hang on to various areas of our lives, and so grace cannot permeate us to the full, we do not achieve the fullness of grace that was Our Lady’s special privilege. Nevertheless, that is what God wills for us, that is the destiny he had in mind for each one for us- to be like Our Lady, completely conformed to his will by our total acceptance of his grace flowing into every part of ourselves. The point was forcefully made by none other than our dear lamented Cardinal Lustiger, who died in Paris ten days ago. In a homily on the feast of the Assumption in Notre Dame a few years ago, the Cardinal said that God wants each Christian to have his or her own version of the destiny of Mary. Mary was the vessel chosen by God to bring into the world Our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that actually, when you think about it, is our vocation too. After all, each of us is in a sense the servant, the handmaid of the Lord. He says “C’est la volonté de Dieu que son serviteur soit dans le monde celui par qui la vie est donnée - It is the will of God that his servant should be in the world the one through whom life is given”. May each of us strive to realise in our lives this high vocation, to bring the life of Christ to our world, and may our blessed Lady help us to achieve this, by encouraging us to respond – “sans réserve” as Saint Claude used to say, without holding back- to the graces that God will surely send us. Amen.

Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007

Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007

Today’s Gospel starts with what seems to us at first glance a perfectly reasonable request: a man in the crowd asks Jesus to persuade his brother to share their inheritance between them- “give me a share of our inheritance”. It sounds like a request for justice, for fair shares, and so we are perhaps a bit surprised at Our Lord’s rather cool reaction and refusal to get involved- “Who made me your judge or the arbitrator of your claims?” We need to look at that request of the man in the crowd a little more closely- what is it really about? What is he really saying? As so often, to make sense of these things we have to go back to the original greek text. The word we have translated as “inheritance”- kleronomia- is actually, as the RSV, always more accurate, knows, a word meaning property, or real estate. Divide up the property, is what the man is saying. And the word for “arbitrator” –meristes- is literally a word that means “divider”, the one who splits the property up. Now, in the Jewish world at the time of Jesus, normally a dead man’s estate passed whole and entire to the firstborn, what we call in legal terms primogeniture. But you could ask to have it split between the children, which is the norm in some countries like France today. The problem was, would the farm, or whatever the state consisted of, still be viable once it was split up? And this is part of what we must consider this morning: is it OK for me to have what I want from life, what I think of as rightfully mine, is this a legitimate ambition? And especially, we need to consider, is it still OK if my taking these things for myself means taking them away from somebody else? Because usually, my having something will mean someone else, perhaps someone equally or more deserving than me, not having it. And what do we think about that?

Don’t worry, I am not going to use this as a springboard to preach against material things and to urge renunciation upon you. How could I, who you all know, am one of the most acquisitive of people, risk such a thing! No, there is nothing wrong, as far as I see it, in wanting and acquiring the good things of this world- up to a point, and as long as we recognise- as the Church has been teaching from the great Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century to the present day- that possessions come with responsibilities as well as rights. The idea too that you might want to put something by for a rainy day, does that seem so bad? It sounds like the action of a prudent person, and I am sure we would all like to be in the comfortable position of the rich man who says to himself “you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come”, and indeed, perhaps some of you are!

And again, I have to say I rather like the sound of the advice the rich man gives himself: “take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time!” Food and drink, especially wine- especially perhaps Cotes du Rhone- these are surely among the good gifts of a loving Father that we are expected to relish? Enjoying the fruits of creation, appreciating the good things of life, well, it’s almost a religious duty, depending how you look at it. So I often reason with myself.

But there is a danger in all this, isn’t there. And the danger seems to me that in what seems like a proper desire to become self-sufficient, to stand on one’s own two feet in life, and to have your pension plan sorted and your investments ticking over nicely, you can begin to think that you have got life under your own control. What a delusion! And somehow then God is often gradually sidelined, because he is needed so much less, as there are fewer and fewer occasions when we feel frail and unprotected and when the future frightens us, and these, as Fr Bosco reminded us last week, are usually the only occasions in which we turn to God in prayer at all. This is why in his version of the Beatitudes St Luke can say just “Blessed are you poor”- God will always be a vivid reality to people who have no money to shield them from whatever life throws at them.

But life will throw things at us, whoever we are and however much money we’ve got. And we fool ourselves, don’t we, if we think that our possessions and policies, that make us feel so secure, are the source of our ultimate security- as Jesus says “a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns”. The good things of life, which we rightly enjoy, may be taken from us without warning- look how we are reeling in St Saviour’s this week from the sudden death of our beloved Josephine, gone from us in the twinkling of an eye. She is someone, we may safely guess, who is going straight to the heavenly banquet, but can each of us be so sure about ourselves? Will I be going straight from the foie gras and the Cotes du Rhone to the nectar and the ambrosia of the feast with the saints? At the moment it is too close to call….

And so, while we still have time, that most precious of our possessions, and one that may be taken from us any second, let us sort out our portfolio for Heaven, and just as we might go to a financial adviser to get our investments on to a solid footing, let us think about going to another sort of specialist, let us take a searching look at our spiritual life and make a visit to the Confessional this month. Let us make ourselves rich, then, whether we can make ourselves honestly rich in the sight of the world or not, rich in the sight of God. Lord Jesus, give us the grace to keep “our thoughts on heavenly things” as St Paul says, so that when the demand is made for our souls, we will not appear before you empty-handed, but be able to offer you a hoard made up, not of gold and silver, but of our prayers an good deeds. Amen.

Homily for the eleventh Sunday of the Year C 17 June 2007

There is a story that someone wrote in the preface to his book “I want to thank my wife, without whose help this book would have been written in half the time”. In similar vein, I want to thank Fr Sean for making the preparation for this homily much harder than I expected it to be, for we have been discussing this Gospel reading all the week and he has made me see how complex it is. The central action of this dramatic scene which Luke describes for us is the extravagant gesture of love and gratitude of the unnamed woman, the woman “who had a bad name in the town”, wiping the feet of Jesus with her unbraided hair, covering them with her kisses and anointing them with an alabaster jar of ointment. Now all four Gospels have a scene like this in them: I expect you are already thinking of Matthew, who tells us that shortly before the arrest of Jesus, he was at Bethany when a woman came up to him and anointed his head with what Matthew calls “very expensive ointment”, prompting Judas to complain “Why this waste?”, the money could have been given to the poor! Mark tells us the same story, with Jesus explaining “She has done a beautiful thing to me” and telling us that is like anointing his body for burial. John too tells the same story, placing it not in the house of Simon but in the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus; and here it is Mary who anoints Jesus’ feet with her precious ointment and wipes them with her hair, and John tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”. Luke’s account of this scene is quite different- perhaps in fact, it is not a case of him remembering the scene differently from the others, but a completely different occasion altogether- we will let the biblical scholars worry about that! What we need to ask ourselves this morning is, what is Luke trying to tell us in the way he presents this story to us?

We know that this woman, whoever she may have been, is someone “who had a bad name in the town”. Many people have assumed that she was a prostitute, but the Gospel does not say that and we must beware of thinking that the only grave sins are sexual sins. I do not want to suggest that sexual sins are of no consequence, not at all, but there are many other ways of failing God, many other destructive and self-destructive things that we can do that put us at odds with God. The main thing is, that this woman recognises her sinfulness, that she makes a deliberate effort to put the past behind her, and to ask for Our Lord’s forgiveness. She receives in return the assurance of God’s loving forgiveness, and is once again enfolded in Our Lord’s embrace of unconditional, constant love, the only embrace that can truly satisfy, the only love that will never disappoint us or go sour, the only embrace that we can always rely on. On our recent parish pilgrimage, some of us went to Paray le Monial, to the Shrine of St Claude, and we recall what St Claude says of Jesus “You are the only friend, the only true friend”.

Now, commenting on this act of great love, this sign of such devotion, Jesus says in this passage “Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love.” And thus we come to the real point that Luke is determined to make here. The fact that this woman has received forgiveness has changed her whole attitude to life. She has received Our Lord’s boundless love, and her life is now a channel of that same love, she is pouring love out like the expensive ointment, in gratitude to her saviour. How appropriate it is that we read this Gospel only two days after celebrating the feast of the Sacred Heart, to which so many of us at St Saviour’s have such a strong devotion. On Friday we read at mass from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he says “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us”. That love we have received must not lie like so much stagnant water in our lives for kept to ourselves it will just go stale. We must let it instead bubble up in us like a fountain, and let it brim over into the lives of those around us. Our Lord is no longer walking the earth for us in our gratitude to approach him and throw ourselves upon him- but we know that we find Jesus in our fellow men and women, and we can show them the love we want to show him. We must try to become more like God in the way we treat people, in the way we love. I read the other day a wonderful phrase that sums this up in the writings of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, the former Archbishop of Marseille. He is explaining how we must love our neighbour in exactly the same, unconditional, constant, affirming way that God loves each one of us, without thinking whether or not that neighbour is worthy of our love or not. He says “our love of others must borrow from the divine love its most characteristic traits, in the first place, that of gratuité- gratuitousness!

It is that gratuitous, undemanding love that we must, in our love for God, offer to God’s fellow creatures with whom we live. St Luke gives us a challenging example to follow, in this woman whose many sins have been forgiven and who now shows Our Lord such reckless, extravagant love in return. As Mark has Jesus say, “she has done a beautiful thing to me”. Tonight as we go to bed, shall we ask ourselves a question: “What beautiful thing have I done to Jesus today?” And as we turn over in our minds the day that lies ahead of us tomorrow, can we ask ourselves “What beautiful thing shall I do to Jesus tomorrow?” May we all attempt these acts of gratuitous love towards our fellow human beings, whether we like them or not, and may our dear parish, and this town, become like the home of Mary and Martha, “filled with the fragrance of the ointment”, the fragrance of love. Amen.

Homily for Christmas Day 2006

I wonder if you are feeling, as I used to do, that this is a funny sort of Gospel for Christmas morning- where are the shepherds we had at the Midnight Mass and earlier this morning? Mary and Joseph, the ox and the ass, that’s what we want to hear about. Not very Christmassy, is it, all that stuff about the Word. Why does the Church offer us this Gospel on Christmas Day, what lessons are we expected to draw from it?

Matthew and Luke give us the stories that we know so well and love to hear every year of the birth of Jesus, God coming into the world as a tiny baby in the stable at Bethlehem, the event that our crib so beautifully illustrates for us. John does not do that. The stories in Matthew and Luke show us so much of the human side of Jesus’s birth- Mary pregnant and Joseph at his wits’ end trying to find them a bed for the night, the humble shepherds being scared out of their wits by the angels in the middle of the night. John doesn’t give us any of that. John’s Gospel is of all the gospels the one most anxious that we recognise that Jesus is not just a wonderful human being specially blessed and specially close to God, but that Jesus is also divine, is God. OK, he is a tiny baby who needs his mother’s milk and who needs his nappy changed, all of that, but this vulnerable little creature in Mary’s arms is God, God who has made himself vulnerable, God who has put himself literally in our hands.

To make his point, that Jesus is God, John uses this word “Word”, he calls Jesus “the Word”. “In the beginning was the word: the word was with God and the word was God”. Why does John do that, what is all that supposed to mean? I want to share with you the explanation that St Augustine, our great theologian from fourth century North Africa, gave to his congregation all those many years ago. He asked his congregation to think about what happens when you have a conversation with someone. First you think of what you want to say and the idea forms in your heart, and then you put it into words, you use your body- your lungs, your mouth, your tongue and lips, to give form to your idea, to give it voice, and then finally the person you are addressing hears and receives your idea, and takes it into their heart too. And the idea, although it has gone from me to you, hasn’t actually left me, the idea is still there in my heart, only now it is also in your heart. What a very clever way St Augustine had of explaining things! For you see what we call the incarnation, God taking human flesh and becoming a man, what we are celebrating today, is exactly that- a conversation with God which we are all now involved in, whether we like it or not. God’s great idea, the idea that he wants to communicate to us, is nothing less than himself, he wants us to understand to the best of our limited ability who he is, what his nature is, what he is about, what he is for. And to do that effectively, he uses the human body, he gives bodily form to his idea, he makes himself accessible and understandable to us in human form. And although God’s idea, Jesus, was now on earth in human form he was still nevertheless with God in eternity, because the idea is still in God’s mind although now it’s in ours too.

Have I lost you? I hope not. What I want to say essentially is that when someone speaks to us, when someone tries to communicate with us, we have to respond. What will be our response this Christmas to God communicating himself to us, coming to us as Jesus? When God came the first time, as a baby in the manger, he did not get much of a reception, did he? The human race did not respond very well- when he grew up, they only liked him when he said things they agreed with and when he got too challenging for them, they killed him. That’s what came of God putting himself in our hands. But God is putting himself in our hands today, at this very Mass. Not in the form of a vulnerable little baby now, but in the equally vulnerable form of bread, God is coming to us. When God came to the old Israel, the Jewish people he had chosen as his own, St John tells us “he came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him”. The Church as we know is the New Israel, and we are God’s own people, Jesus’s own brothers and sisters by the adoption that is our baptism, St Saviour’s is God’s own domain. And will it be said of us, “he came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him”.

Let us take Our Lord into our hearts at this Mass, let us take in and absorb the idea of God, the communication that God is desperate to have with us, let us take in Jesus and show him how much we are ready to accept him and make him welcome. How can we do that? Well, we can show love to Our Lord best by showing love to those around us. Let all our words today be words of love, words of love for the person who is cooking lunch, for your families and your friends, for the person who wants to watch all the programmes you hate most, for the person who has bought you socks when you distinctly asked for an I-pod, yes, even for the person who thinks you will like Australian Chardonnay…. And then you see, not only will you be receiving God into your life, but you will be communicating God, the God who is Love, to those around you. You will be passing on a wonderful rumour- that “the Word was made flesh and lived among us”.

In today’s Gospel we read “to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God”. Dear Jesus, give us the grace to receive you into our hearts today, receive you and make you truly welcome in our lives. May this dear parish indeed be your own domain where your own people did accept you. Amen.

Homily for Epiphany 2007

Today as we see in our beautiful crib the wise men, the Magi, the Kings as we have come to think of them, have arrived at the manger, bringing with them their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. I am very indebted to Fr Sean for inviting me to preach at this mass because I have always had a great fascination for the Magi, which is why I for my ordination card what was really a Christmas card, a picture of the wise men laying their gifts in homage before the Christ-child.

Who were these strange, exotic visitors who suddenly turn up in the village of Bethlehem and enter the humble cave where the Holy Family are making the best of things with the farm animals around them? What do we know about them really? We have come to think of them as three wise men, because they bring three gifts, but Matthew as we just heard does not say how many there were, he just says “some wise men” and we have come to think of them as kings, and give them crowns in our depiction of them, because from the first the Church associated with them those words from psalm 71 we have just heard- “the kings of Tarshish and the sea coasts shall pay him tribute, the kings of Seba and Sheba shall bring him gifts”. They were certainly important people, whoever they were, and not Jews, for they have come from foreign lands, they have come “from the east”, and they do not know the Scriptures and the prophecies in them about the birth of the Messiah until the chief priests and the scribes explain it all to them. They are called in the original Greek of the New Testament “magoi”, the magi, and historians tell us that magi were people who studied astrology and used all kinds of magic, superstition and charms, in countries like Persia. But, in spite of knowing nothing of the insights into God that the Jews had discovered and written down in what we call the Old Testament, the one true God, the creator of the world and the loving Father of all humankind, nevertheless they have been honestly searching for the truth and have made the sacrifice of a long journey into the unknown to find it.
The wise men, the kings, the magi, whatever we chose to call them, these are complex and complicated people- they are not straightforward and easy to understand, like the humble shepherds who come running in from the nearby fields on Christmas night while the angels are singing in the sky above them. These are people more like ourselves, they are people who come from outside the world of our familiar religion, they have come literally from the outside world. They have tried all kinds of substitutes for real religion, just as many of us have or have been tempted to do, and they are people who think they know a thing or two about how the real world, as they see it, works- they know how to work the system! They follow purely human reasoning, as so many people in our modern world do, and that is fine, but it will only take you so far. They think, well, this baby is going to be the king of the Jews so obviously he will be born in a palace and obviously we must try and use our contacts and try to meet the king, probably he’s the father! How wrong could they be!
The Holy Father preached many times on the theme of the Magi at the world Youth Days in August 2005, because of course they took place in Cologne where the three wise men lie buried in gold caskets in the cathedral. He said at the time “in our hearts we have the same urgent question that prompted the magi from the east to set out on their journey, even if it is differently expressed. …we are no longer looking for a king, but we are concerned for the state of the world and we are asking “Where do I find standards to live by….on whom can I rely? To whom can I entrust myself? Where is the One who can offer me the response capable of satisfying my heart’s deepest desires?” And the Pope goes on to tell us that like the magi we must take the right road if we are to find the child in the manger who has the answer to all this and more. Which road, he asks, shall we take? “The one prompted by the passions or the one indicated by the star which shines in your conscience?” And of course, the God whom we find is always a surprise and a challenge to us- God is not as we imagine him to be, he is far far more than the product of our imagination. The magi had quite a shock, didn’t they- they ended up not being ushered into some wonderful room in a palace to meet a prince born with every luxury around him, but kneeling in the straw in a stable, looking at a baby on the knee of what looked like just an ordinary country girl. As Pope Benedict says, “the new king to whom they now paid homage was quite unlike what they were expecting. In this way they had to learn that God is not as we usually imagine him to be”. Having made one journey, they have now to start on an inner journey, and the Pope goes on “they had to change their ideas about power, about God and about man, and in so doing they also had to change themselves”.

A few weeks ago in this church we saw our own magi, pausing on their search for the truth of God and coming into our midst to ask for our prayers and support- we have in this parish a group of people who have come from all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs who are on the same sort of journey in faith- I refer of course to our own RCIA, which I have the great privilege of organising each year and with whom, with the other clergy, I try to share the insights of our holy religion, so that these good people too will come to recognise the child in the manger as Jesus, their Lord and God, and come to do him homage when they are received into the church at the Easter Vigil.

At this Mass today we approach the altar rails to meet Jesus, just as the magi approached the manger long ago. We are in Bethlehem too, for Bethlehem as you know is Hebrew for “House of Bread”, and in a way this church’ like all Catholic churches, is a house of bread, where Jesus dwells in the form of bread in our tabernacle, and we meet today in the form of bread the same Jesus the magi did two millennia ago. May we too return from our encounter with Jesus changed in our thoughts and in our behaviour, may we too return to our own country by a different way. Amen.

Homily for Third Sunday of Easter 22 April 2007

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is so rich in themes that the preacher is spoilt for choice, but all week long I have been obsessed by one aspect of it- the 153 fish! Why does the writer of this Gospel tell us there were 153 fish in the net? We can be sure of one thing, that for the first audience who heard this Gospel, that number meant something. St John’s Gospel as I have said before is the most literary of the Gospels, very carefully written, with every word full of significance and echoes and allusions that the evangelist expected his readers to pick up on. Ah ha! They said when they first heard this around the year 100, probably in Ephesus or somewhere along the Turkish coast of the Med, Ah ha! 153 fish- you see! Need we say more, we all know what that means, don’t we! Well, 1900 years later, in another world, we don’t. The number has been baffling people for years. Even our great St Augustine, in fourth century Africa, could only say to his congregation, “it is a great mystery”. But, a clever man, a contemporary of St Augustine, St Jerome, busy translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in his cave in Bethlehem, came up with an answer. He discovered that the ancient Greeks believed that there were 153 types of fish in the world, that was the limit of their zoology. In other words, when the evangelist says there were 153 fish in the net, he is actually saying that every type of fish was in the net, every type of fish that existed in the world. What he means by that of course, is that the net, which I don’t have to explain to you is the Church, reaches out to and contains within it people from every type, every race, every nation on the earth.

Here at St Saviour’s we are part of that all-embracing net. Look around you- I bet that there are three nationalities in the pew where you are sitting. You see, this church is in London, in England, but it is not an English church, it is a Catholic church, and catholic means universal. We have the 153 fish right here! Just going through the alphabet, look at what we find: we have Albanians, the RCIA had a gorgeous girl from Brazil, there’s a lady from Cameroun, people from the Congo, our dear people from Cote d’Ivoire- bonjour, chers amis-, we have Bruce my friend who is English through and through, F is for our Filipinos full of faith, G – well, my cousin from Germany is down there, and moving on, we have India behind me, and looking down the church I can see our good Irish people who founded this parish long ago, moving on again we have M for Madeira, N for our Nigerians- who can imagine this parish without them? We have Poland in the sanctuary, we have Sicily in the choir, and under S we have of course our beloved Tamils from Sri Lanka… I’ve missed half of you out I know, but we’v e got the world here, haven’t we, from Australia to Zambia, from A to Z. We’ve got the 153 fish in the net!

So we are in the net all of us. Now when Jesus says to the disciples “Bring some of the fish you have just caught” he uses in the Greek a very unusual word for “catch”, he uses a word which means “arrest”- in fact it is the same word that is used when the Roman soldiers arrest Jesus in the Garden of Olives. So we are caught in the net, we are arrested by the Church. When we enter the Church, we are in a sense under arrest, Our Lord has taken us into custody, protective custody if you like. We are no longer swimming aimlessly about, a prey to all the tides of fashion and all the currents in our society, at the mercy of every crashing wave of sin that can break over our lives and swamp us- no, we are under arrest, we have been stopped in our tracks, and now we belong in the net, in God’s holy Church- and notice, the net does not break- “in spite of there being so many, the net was not broken”. The Church will not let us down, will not let us go- we are safe in her arms, she will bring us safe to the shore, safe to our salvation.

And now we must consider one more aspect of this fish saga. The Greek language has a good word for fish and I expect many of you know what it is, because it is the name of a small protestant sect – it is ichthus. Well, when this story opens, ichthus is the word that the evangelist is using every time we hear in our English version the word “fish”. But halfway through, he starts to use a different word, opsarion. James, I hear you saying, what does it matter? Who cares? Get on with it! But have patience with me a bit longer. Opsarion means fish that something has happened to, dried fish, cooked fish, grilled fish, cured fish, preserved fish. Ichthus is salmon, and opsarion is smoked salmon. It is very odd that what Jesus says is “bring some of the treated fish that you have arrested” . You see, once we are caught in the net, once we become members of the Church, once we have been stopped in our tracks by God, we will have to change, we will undergo a process of change that is like grilling fish or smoking it- we will become fish that can be kept, that won’t go off after three days and stink the place out, but fish that we can keep without it losing its quality. The contact with our Lord Jesus, who is waiting to deal with the fish that is in the disciples’ net, the touch of Jesus, will bring about in us a profound change, but one that will, however searing and painful the process may be, result in our preservation.

These altar rails are the seashore, on which at communion Our Lord is waiting for his encounter with you this morning. The contents of the net will be poured out as you surge forward to receive the Host. You do not need to ask “Who are you?”, for like the disciples you know quite well it is the Lord. May the Lord touch every heart today, every fish in the net of our dear St Saviour’s, and preserve them to eternal life. Amen.

Homily for Fifth Sunday of Easter 6 May 2007

Today’s Gospel takes us back to the Last Supper, when Jesus is acutely aware that the time of his earthly life is running out, and that he has still much to tell his disciples- “My little children” he says” I shall not be with you much longer”. And then, in the urgency of the hour, he sums up all that he has wanted to teach and pass on to his disciples in this one phrase “I give you a new commandment: love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another”.

To understand fully what this scene is about, we have to remember that Jesus is creating a New Israel, with instead of the Twelve tribes as their basic identity, the Twelve Apostles he has chosen; he wants his followers to be a new people, and he wants them to forge a new identity. In the Apocalypse we have just heard a vision of how things might be, when all the nations of the earth come into this new identity, this new people of God which Jesus is recruiting: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. Actually, last week’s reading was much better: “I saw a huge number, impossible to count, of people from every nation, race, tribe and language, they were standing in front of the throne”. Sounds like St Saviour’s doesn’t it.

Now I want us to go back to think for a moment about what happened when the first Israel was formed, when the first people of God came together and received its identity. That was of course when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt where they had been living as slaves and brought them in due course to the Promised Land. Although the vast majority of this horde of people escaping from Pharaoh’s clutches were of course the descendants of Jacob’s sons and so all one kindred, they included in fact a whole mixture of people of every sort- it says in Exodus 12:38 “a mixed multitude went with them”. To weld these ex-slaves, this whole ramshackle muddle of people into one people, was the task God gave Moses while they wandered for so many years in the Sinai- they couldn’t go straight to the freedom and the joys of the Promised Land until they had shed their slave mentality, and until they had taken on and really absorbed their new identity, as free men and women, and as the Chosen People of God, as Israel. To bind them together, as that awful hymn has it, to bind them together Moses gives them the Ten commandments- these are not just a list of do’s and don’t’s- but in fact the terms of the contract that will now bind God and his people together for always, what is sometimes called the Covenant. These ten commandments are the Magna Carta if you like of this new nation, Israel, its foundation document. Now, Hebrew is a very strange language and its verbs do not really behave in the same way we expect verbs to behave in our western languages. Instead of these commandments beginning “Do not” they could just as well be translated as “you don’t… in other words, it is quite possible to look at the ten commandments and see them not as a proscription but as a description- they are saying “you are people who don’t steal, you are people who don’t kill, you are people who don’t tell lies” and so on. And so we see in the experience of the first Israel, that this mixed multitude are forged into one people, with a new identity for them all to share, whatever their origins, by the giving to them of a founding document, a description that tells them who they are and how they are to live their lives.

Back to the Gospel! Jesus as we said before is founding a new people, and his new Israel is even more of a mixed multitude than the old was- remember the 153 fish in the net two weeks ago? All the nations of the earth are to come into the net of the Church and are to come under Jesus’s influence. And now we are all in the net, you remember I said two weeks ago the fish in the net has to be treated, has to change- well, this is what Jesus is talking about at the Last Supper in today’s Gospel. God used Moses as the one who would impart to the Israelites their identity, their new laws, the ten commandments, on which their whole identity was to be based. Now Jesus uses his Twelve apostles- well, eleven now that Judas has left them- to be the bearers of the commandment that he is giving to his new Israel, the law that will describe them, that will give them their common identity, that will define them. “I give you a new commandment, love one another….by this love you have for one another everyone will know that you are my disciples”. This commandment that our Lord gives us is to be the basis of our lives, what defines us and what keeps us in our proper relationship with him, it is our covenant, our new contract and our new identity. Our dear St Augustine, commenting on this text in fourth century Africa, says “it is a new commandment inasmuch as it strips away the old man and clothes us in the new…such love renews us: we become new men, heirs of the new testament, singers of a new song. From the whole human race all over the world it creates and gathers together a new people, the new bride of the Son of God”.

We must look closely at this gospel passage- is this our identity? Does this sound like me? I hope so, because these are our identity papers and they are supposed to be a reasonable likeness! Lord Jesus, we gather in this dear church today we come from many lands and we speak many languages- make us into your one holy people, who are united in one common language, the language of love. Amen.