Monday 18 June 2007

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.