Easter V 20 April 2008

Homily for Easter V Year A Sunday 20 April 2008 Today we have another- and perhaps the most well known- of the “I am” sayings of Jesus that occur in St John’s Gospel. Last week we talked about “I am the gate”, this week we need to think about “I am the way, the truth and the life”. We need to try and see how these three things- the way, the truth and the life- are interrelated and what they mean. You see, when Jesus says “I am the Way”, he is saying two things at once really, because he is saying, in response to Thomas’s exasperated question “how can we know the way?”, that he is the way, he is the messenger and the message all in one, he is both the truth and how to find it, the truth and how to live it. What does it mean for us, this idea of living the truth? That is what I would like to reflect on with you today. Back in the 1990s, the last Holy Father, our beloved John Paul II, wrote an encyclical some of you may remember, called “Veritatis Splendor”, the splendour of the truth- it was about the Church’s moral teaching, and this week I found myself looking at it again. It begins by quoting the first Letter of St Peter, where it says that we become holy by “obedience to the truth” and straightaway Pope John Paul admits that this is a very hard thing for us to maintain, because as human beings we are always being “tempted to turn (our) gaze away from the living and true God”- we know the truth, we know what Our Lord teaches, and what the Church, interpreting the mind of Our Lord in every generation, expects of us, and yet, on the whole, we would rather go off and do something else- what difference will it make anyway? This attitude that we so often fall into, is summed up by St Paul in the phrase we find in Romans- “exchanging the truth about God for a lie”. We have seen before, in many reflections we have shared on the Gospels, how that exchange, which we are always so eager to make, is a con trick, an illusion, that leaves us empty-handed at the end- think of the prodigal son, squandering everything on pleasure and still starving at the end, still unsatisfied. How can we maintain that obedience to the truth that will make us holy, how can we keep to the way and have the life, life- as we heard in last week’s Gospel- that Our Lord wants us to have “to the full”? The Servant of God John Paul gives us the answer in this document in a memorable phrase: he says “the good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth”. We have got to do the Truth. Do the Truth! We find a similar phrase in the gospel of St John- “he who does what is true comes to the light” (Jn 3:21). It is up to us- God has given us brains, and he expects us to use them! We can think- we can use our reason to work things out, to weigh up the sides of an argument, to make choices and decisions, and we have our consciences, the basic knowledge of right and wrong that is written in our hearts, that we are all born with. These are the tools, and then it is up to us. This is how God made us, and how he expects us to operate- he wants us to work things out and make the right choices in our lives by ourselves, of our own free will. As it says in the Book of Sirach “it was he who created man in the beginning, and he left him in the power of his own inclination. If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice” (15:14-15). To follow Our Lord, what we have to do, and keep on doing every day, is make choices. This idea of life being about choices, and the importance of our being free to make choices, was especially dear to the heart of that French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre- another John Paul, but rather a different one! He was obsessed with the idea that human beings could only be happy if they were what he called “authentic”. You couldn’t be authentic if you were always trying to fit in with what other people expected of you, he said. That is why he famously said “Other people are hell”- his idea was, you had got to make sure other people had no influence on you whatsoever, because only then would you have any chance of being free, and only then could you choose who you wanted to be and how you wanted to live your life. This is an attractive message, especially when you are young and wanting to rebel against all the adults in your life, which is why so many students back in my young days fell under his spell. But it is nonsense actually. We can never be a blank page, to write on what we want- we can never entirely free ourselves from the influences of our home and family, of our education and upbringing, of what has happened to us in our lives. We are stuck with all that, whether we like it or not, and what we have to do is a much harder, much more subtle task- we have to make our choices in life not by cutting loose from our background, not by re-inventing ourselves, but by absorbing what is there in our lives and making sense of it as best we can, by aligning ourselves ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, who has gone through every aspect of the human condition ahead of us and shown us the way. Not by shunning other people, so that they can make no demands on us and have no effect on our precious identity as a free agent, but by embracing them, and accepting and dealing with their demands on us, will we find our authenticity, our true selves. Because we know that all those paradoxes are true- it is in giving that we receive, in losing our life that we find it, and so on. Only when we stop worrying about our own happiness and our own tick-list of what we must have to be content, and think of the happiness of those around us and helping them to tick a few boxes, do we find that, to our surprise, contentment and peace have come to us. Jesus, help us make the choices day by day that keep us close to you for you have said “whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself”. Help us to recognise the truth, to do the truth, and never exchange it for a lie; for the truth will make us free and to serve you is perfect freedom. Amen.

Easter IV 13 April 2008

Homily for Easter IV 13 April 2008 Today’s Gospel comes from St John, and as you know St John’s Gospel has lots of “I am” sayings of Jesus- you know them all: “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the vine”, “I am the bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the good shepherd” and so on. Today Jesus says “I am the gate”, “I am the gate of the sheepfold”. What does this mean? Well, when I was researching this text this week, I discovered something that I hadn’t realised before, that in the Middle East in ancient times, although sheepfolds would have a stone wall or a fence around them, they didn’t actually have gates at all. When the shepherd had managed to herd all his sheep into the fold for the night, he kept them there by lying down across the gap and sleeping there- he himself was literally the gate, his body was the gate. In a very real sense, to get into the sheepfold you had to pass over the body of the shepherd and the shepherd’s body was in the most literal sense the great barrier of protection between the sheep inside and the wolves outside. How full of meaning all this is for us! It is through our intimate connexion with Jesus, through our belonging to his body, the Church, through our Baptism, through our frequent absorption into ourselves of his body in Holy Communion, that we enter and make our home in the sheepfold that is eternal life, the fullness of life that begins already for us here on the earth but will only come to its plenitude beyond the grave in the life to come. Once we are part of the body of Christ, we are through the gate and involved with the shepherd in the process of salvation- Jesus says “anyone who enters through me will be safe”. We have, by becoming Christians, by aligning ourselves with Our Lord, by belonging to the Church he founded, entered the sheepfold of which he is the gate, we have joined his flock, we have become the sheep which he says will “be sure of finding pasture”. Now that is another important point. Pasture. Why shepherds are roaming around the hills with a flock of sheep is not so they can admire the view or get some exercise, it is so they can feed- the shepherd’s main job, apart from keeping them all together and not losing any of them, is to find them places where they can eat, where they can eat the grass and so on. Sheep are not good at finding food for themselves, they are easily attracted to the wrong stuff, stuff that tastes great to them but is bad for them. There is that famous passage in Thomas Hardy, in “Far from the madding crowd” when Bathsheba’s sheep run off and get into a field of young clover, and gorge themselves on it until their stomachs swell up and they foam at the mouth. The peasants come running to Bathsheba- “they be getting blasted, that they be, and will all die as dead as nits if they bain’t got out and cured!” Sure enough, the bloated sheep start to collapse and die, and of course Bathsheba has to send for the man she has only just sacked, Gabriel Oak, and swallow her pride and ask him to sort the sheep out. (He does, she marries him.) Now this is us, isn’t it, we are not always the best judge of what is good for us, what will bring us happiness, contentment, fulfilment. We run after fantasies, we find the young clover of a thousand delusions, and fall on it ravenously, feeding every selfish impulse we have. We gorge ourselves at our peril. We can be however in safe hands, for we can choose to stay in the sheepfold with the shepherd, and our shepherd, Jesus, is the good shepherd, who ensures that we have good pasture- that is, that our souls are fed, that we have a diet that is good for us, that we grow in maturity and in our faith, that we find in unselfishness the road to true contentment and inner peace. For once through the gate that is our intimacy with Our Lord, we have entered upon the fullness of life, life as it is supposed to be lived and understood, life in its reality and in all its potential. As Jesus says at the end of this reading “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”. But to look at this parable a bit differently, we can say, as St Paul often tells us, that Jesus is the Head of his Body the Church- the Church is Jesus’s body on the earth, and we are the Church, so we are called as Christians to be for those around us the Gate, the way to eternal life. There is a church in the East End of London, near where I used to work, that actually has that written in huge letters round its walls- “This is the gate of Heaven”. Our dear St Saviour’s too is a gate, a gate between earth and heaven. We could say, whenever we come in, those words of psalm 117: Open to me the gates of holiness, I will enter and give thanks, this is the Lord’s own gate where the just may enter”. And the flock of sheep, that is of course the human race, now as then in urgent need of finding the right food, the pasture that will satisfy its needs, and therefore in urgent need of having good shepherds to protect and guide it. And that brings us of course to our need in every generation for men to be willing to discern in their hearts the calling of the great shepherd to join him in his task, in the priesthood and diaconate, to guide and nourish his flock on his behalf, for today is Vocations Sunday. Let us pray that there will be found in our own congregation boys and young men, and indeed men in their maturity, who will have the generosity of heart to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and offer themselves for ministry in the Church. But in all this, let us never overlook the fact that each one of us, man or woman, has a calling to fulfil, a vocation indeed to be, as a Christian, a Gate, a way for those we work and live with to come into the safety of the sheepfold and the contentment of the good pasture. And as we come this morning to the pasture that is Holy Communion, to unite ourselves to the Body that is the Gate, let us say: “Lord Jesus, you are the Gate; may we enter through you and be safe, may we have life and have it to the full.” Amen.