Homily for the Immaculate Conception 8 December 2009
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate Chelmsford
I must say I always find the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady a difficult subject to explain – am I alone in this? As Catholics we understand the special nature of Our Lady almost instinctively, it is all part of the great reverence in which we hold her, but how to put this into words! The first thing we have to remind ourselves of, is that although only formally defined as a dogma of the Church in the 19th century, the idea that Our Lady was somehow always preserved by God from sin to fit her for her role as the one who would bear Divinity in her womb, and bring the Second Person of the Trinity into the world, the Theotokos, was present, at least implicitly, in the thought of the Fathers of the Church from the first centuries. Perhaps the earliest reference to this belief we have is in the “Letter to the Priests and Deacons of Achaia” – this may or may not be late 1st century, scholars worry about these things, but already this ancient document claims that God willed that “from an undefiled Virgin should be born the perfect man.” To move on to the fourth century: as your dear Community has a devotion to your holy father St Augustine, may I remind you of some lines of his? “How in fact could we know” he asks “the degree of grace given to her to conquer sin in every way, for she who was worthy to conceive and bring forth him who certainly never sinned?”
The Bible affords us examples of people who will have a special mission in life being prepared for it already at the moment of conception or in the womb. We think straightaway of the prophet Jeremiah, who tells us that “the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.’” (Jer 1:4-5) And of course we have the Psalmist saying “Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb….thou knowest me right well, my frame was not hidden from thee when I was being made in secret.” (Ps 139:13-15) And then there is John the Baptist, of whom the Angel Gabriel said “he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” (Lk 1:15) The monk of Canterbury, Eadmer, writing in the 11th century, friend and biographer of St Anselm, was one of the first to compose a treatise on the Immaculate Conception – St Anselm of course introduced this very feast into the calendar of England and Normandy; Eadmer calls Our Lady “the gentlest cradle of the only Son of Almighty God”, and again “the palace where the Christ in person would assume human nature” and having reminded us of this text about John the Baptist asks “who would dare say that the Virgin….was deprived at the very instant of her conception of the grace and right of the Holy Spirit?” We would be here all night if I went through all the sources- I just have three more writers to quote! That great Oratorian Cardinal de Bérulle in the 16th century explains the Immaculate Conception in this way: he says “God exists and acts in her more than she does herself” “She has no thought but by his grace, no movement but by his Spirit, no action but by his love”. In a similar way, St Maximilian Kolbe writing in the 1930s says “there was not found in her the least distancing of herself from the will of God”. To come right up to our own times, the French theologian and new auxiliary bishop of Lyon, Mgr Patrick Le Gall, when considering the Immaculate Conception, homes in on the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians: what St Paul is saying here of the destiny of all Christians, is particularly true of Mary: he says God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him”. (Eph 1:4) Mgr Le Gall says that this destiny of Our Lady, which we call the Immaculate Conception, makes us admire the power of the redemption that Christ achieves in one human being: “capable….of opening a space of fantastic freedom to recognise and respond to the call of God in all its richness”.
And now I come to what I think! Well, the explanation I like best, anyway. I got it from the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For me, as for him, the way in to this dogma of the Immaculate Conception lies in approaching it using the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Now don’t go to sleep, this is easy to understand I assure you! Plato had this idea that the world around us, and everything that we can see with our senses, is not real. Things in this world are in a constant state of flux, everything is changing all the time, the best idea we can get of anything using our senses is just a snapshot of the state it’s in right now. Plants are forever putting forth new leaves and shoots, flowers come into bud, open and fade – as the French say, “tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse”. It is only with the mind that we can really understand things, in the mind that we can hold the idea, what Plato calls the “form” of a thing, the idea of a thing in its essence, in its perfection, in its accuracy. No flower in any of its stages will be as perfect as the picture of what a flower should be that we have in our mind’s eye. Now when all these platonic ways of thinking were taken up by the first Christian thinkers- no surprise that they were, it was how they had been educated –you can see how useful they are as a way of thinking about our Christian destiny. Which is the real me? The picture of me at 20 with raven hair, the one of me in my forties in my Oxford gown? The one of me naked on a hearth rug (age 9 months I hasten to add! I’m not speaking of any recent indiscretion!) the ageing deacon in his late prime you see before you? Plato would say none of them are the real me, because the real James cannot be seen by the naked eye- the real James exists only in the mind of God. Now God, we can say, has in his creating of us as individuals, in his bringing of each one of us into the world, a form of us in his mind, an idea- the ideal version of me, that is my ultimate destiny, the me that God wants me to become. This is what St Paul means when in Sunday’s reading from his Letter to the Philippians he speaks of us reaching “the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us”, the version of ourselves that is “pure and blameless”. (Phil 1:10-11) And we, insofar as we co-operate with God’s grace or not, embark in our Christian living on the process of trying to align our version of ourselves, the work that is always in progress in our souls, with this perfect version of us that is in God’s mind, that is God’s will for me, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ” as St Paul has it. Alas, for most of us, poor frail human beings that we are, so easily deluded and derailed, the version of ourselves that we bring to our deathbeds is still some way off from the ideal of us that is in God’s mind! The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that there will at least be some points of resemblance between the two! Now to return finally to Our Lady- she is the exception of course. She is the one human being who fits the picture completely, with no discrepancies- as Fulton Sheen says “there is a perfect conformity between what he wanted her to be and what she is”. “Most of us” he says “are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign….the Ideal that God had of her, that she is.” She is the one who is “pure and blameless”, “holy and blameless.”
Dear friends, when St Bernadette saw Our Lady in the grotto, she asked her who she was. “I am the Immaculate Conception” came the astounding reply. What Our Lady is giving us in these words is the explanation, the key, to her whole existence: conceived, brought into being by God as each one of us is, a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and yet immaculate- so at one with God and his will for her that she was brimful of his sanctifying grace, with no room for the slightest iota of sin, and could therefore only be what he had always had in mind for her to be. The explanation, in fact, of every Christian destiny, the ultimate aspiration of every human being: “holy and blameless before him”,as St Paul says. May grace be given to us all this evening to co-operate ever more readily with God, so that the gap between who we are and who he wants us to be narrows and goes on diminishing. May Our Lady aid us by her prayers, so that we come ever closer to fulfilling the high hopes that Our Heavenly Father has of each one of us, so that on the Last Day we too may appear in our humbler turn “holy and blameless before him”, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ”. Amen.
Wednesday 9 December 2009
Sunday 8 November 2009
Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 Nov 2009
Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 November 2009
Since we commemorated Armistice Day last year, the last three survivors of the First World War have gone to their rest in their extreme old age, and so that war, which older generations called the Great War, has now finally passed out of living memory. It was a war that cost ten thousand men’s lives a day and when it was over all over the United Kingdom every town or village, every college, every school, every church- even railway stations like Waterloo - put up its war memorial with those long sad lists of names, the names of all those young men whose lives had been sacrificed. How poignant it is to read the inscriptions on those memorials, how optimistic, how naïve they sound to us now- this was “the War to end War”, the final conflict for the triumph of Liberty, of Justice and Peace- the survivors and the bereaved families just couldn’t believe that sacrifice and slaughter on that vast scale could have been in vain. They so wanted to believe that the words of the Apocalypse we have just heard were to come true in their time: “There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone”. Alas, they were wrong- within the lifetimes of many of those who inscribed such sentiments on the memorials, Europe – and with it, the whole world - was once again convulsed with the horrors of war. And so it is, isn’t it- when one war ends, another starts up so that war just goes on, doesn’t it, somewhere in the world, all the time – the bazaars of Rawalpindi last week have shown us that, and we can’t ever lose sight of the whole ferment of violence that continues along what we used to call The North West Frontier, or the endemic hatred that simmers away in the Middle East. Genocide, which we associate for ever with what the Nazi regime did sixty years ago, has happened in our lifetime in places such as the former Yugoslavia and in Africa –one thinks of Ruanda, of Sierra Leone. We are forced to admit that the words of the Apocalypse have not yet come to pass.
Why is that? Well, one place to look for an answer is the Book of Genesis, whose first eleven chapters preserve for us the many ancient traditions of the Jewish people that explain in the style of myths and legends the nature of God and the nature of human beings. Human beings, destined by their loving Creator for a constant, easy friendship with God, are shown in the Adam and Eve story to be determined to be gods themselves, not content to live by the moral absolutes that are divinely appointed, but determined to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong – “if I want to do it, it’s OK!” The story of Cain and Abel that follows immediately after the story of the Fall shows us at once what human nature is capable of: we see the rivalry between two brothers, a resentment of what one brother seems to enjoy and the other thinks should be his, and this envy and bitterness spilling over into violence, and murder. That terrible reply that Cain gives to God when he asks where Abel is- “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer of course should be yes, we should have always before our eyes the common humanity we share with all our fellow human beings of whatever race or background, and consequently all members of the one human family should be our cause for concern. But Cain has impersonalised the whole issue, he has repudiated the common bond between him and his brother- how often that happens in our world- the prelude to atrocities perpetrated against people we resent and dislike is always the distancing of ourselves from them, by the demonising of propaganda and the irresponsibility of generalisations. We are somehow “Us” and they are “Them”. And we see how from this legend of the two brothers that violence and war have entered our world and will never leave it. Genesis shows the descendents of Cain contrasted against the descendents of the third brother Seth. Seth’s offspring stand for that part of the human race that is trying always for a closer union with God, that is open to the Divine- Seth’s son Enosh we are told “was the first to invoke the name of the Lord” in prayer and of one of his descendants Enoch it is said “he walked with God” and did not see death but was assumed into Heaven. But Cain has a descendant Lamech, who sings proudly of his violent behaviour: “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me” and claims that “sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech”. We see that although one side of the human race is forever aspiring to heavenly things, to peace and concord at one with God, the other side is caught up in a momentum of evil- a violence that is for ever increasing as it goes from one generation to the next, because of the deadly power of bitterness within us and its demand for retaliation and revenge.
And of course the really terrifying thing is, that this relentless violence is in fact a warfare that takes place not only on our TV screens in faraway places but inside each and every one of us- the struggle between Good and Evil, which must go on its weary way till the end of time, is a daily combat in our own souls, where we must take up our arms every day. But is this therefore a cause for despair, that human nature is so fatally corrupt that war and violence must always have their sway? Will the promises of the Apocalypse never come true? The answer lies in our reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. This endless tension within us between impulses to do the right thing by God and by others and urges to have our selfish way no matter what can be reconciled, has been reconciled if we will only allow ourselves to co-operate with God’s endless grace- we must trust in “Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation”. The first step towards peace, the peace of the world we all long for – and every Mass after all is explicitly offered “to advance the peace and salvation of all the world” as Canon III has it – is peace within ourselves, peace between me and God. Only then is there a chance that there may come peace on a larger scale, and we will experience rather than just glimpse the true and lasting peace, “the peace that the world cannot give” only Jesus, whose words we hear at every Mass “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” On this day when we recall with sorrow the appalling loss of life in the two world wars of the last century let us pray that such sacrifices were not in vain, and that the human race will learn its sobering lesson from them, and as our small part let us renew our own commitment to peace- peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbours, peace in the world, but first of all, peace with God. Amen.
Since we commemorated Armistice Day last year, the last three survivors of the First World War have gone to their rest in their extreme old age, and so that war, which older generations called the Great War, has now finally passed out of living memory. It was a war that cost ten thousand men’s lives a day and when it was over all over the United Kingdom every town or village, every college, every school, every church- even railway stations like Waterloo - put up its war memorial with those long sad lists of names, the names of all those young men whose lives had been sacrificed. How poignant it is to read the inscriptions on those memorials, how optimistic, how naïve they sound to us now- this was “the War to end War”, the final conflict for the triumph of Liberty, of Justice and Peace- the survivors and the bereaved families just couldn’t believe that sacrifice and slaughter on that vast scale could have been in vain. They so wanted to believe that the words of the Apocalypse we have just heard were to come true in their time: “There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone”. Alas, they were wrong- within the lifetimes of many of those who inscribed such sentiments on the memorials, Europe – and with it, the whole world - was once again convulsed with the horrors of war. And so it is, isn’t it- when one war ends, another starts up so that war just goes on, doesn’t it, somewhere in the world, all the time – the bazaars of Rawalpindi last week have shown us that, and we can’t ever lose sight of the whole ferment of violence that continues along what we used to call The North West Frontier, or the endemic hatred that simmers away in the Middle East. Genocide, which we associate for ever with what the Nazi regime did sixty years ago, has happened in our lifetime in places such as the former Yugoslavia and in Africa –one thinks of Ruanda, of Sierra Leone. We are forced to admit that the words of the Apocalypse have not yet come to pass.
Why is that? Well, one place to look for an answer is the Book of Genesis, whose first eleven chapters preserve for us the many ancient traditions of the Jewish people that explain in the style of myths and legends the nature of God and the nature of human beings. Human beings, destined by their loving Creator for a constant, easy friendship with God, are shown in the Adam and Eve story to be determined to be gods themselves, not content to live by the moral absolutes that are divinely appointed, but determined to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong – “if I want to do it, it’s OK!” The story of Cain and Abel that follows immediately after the story of the Fall shows us at once what human nature is capable of: we see the rivalry between two brothers, a resentment of what one brother seems to enjoy and the other thinks should be his, and this envy and bitterness spilling over into violence, and murder. That terrible reply that Cain gives to God when he asks where Abel is- “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer of course should be yes, we should have always before our eyes the common humanity we share with all our fellow human beings of whatever race or background, and consequently all members of the one human family should be our cause for concern. But Cain has impersonalised the whole issue, he has repudiated the common bond between him and his brother- how often that happens in our world- the prelude to atrocities perpetrated against people we resent and dislike is always the distancing of ourselves from them, by the demonising of propaganda and the irresponsibility of generalisations. We are somehow “Us” and they are “Them”. And we see how from this legend of the two brothers that violence and war have entered our world and will never leave it. Genesis shows the descendents of Cain contrasted against the descendents of the third brother Seth. Seth’s offspring stand for that part of the human race that is trying always for a closer union with God, that is open to the Divine- Seth’s son Enosh we are told “was the first to invoke the name of the Lord” in prayer and of one of his descendants Enoch it is said “he walked with God” and did not see death but was assumed into Heaven. But Cain has a descendant Lamech, who sings proudly of his violent behaviour: “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me” and claims that “sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech”. We see that although one side of the human race is forever aspiring to heavenly things, to peace and concord at one with God, the other side is caught up in a momentum of evil- a violence that is for ever increasing as it goes from one generation to the next, because of the deadly power of bitterness within us and its demand for retaliation and revenge.
And of course the really terrifying thing is, that this relentless violence is in fact a warfare that takes place not only on our TV screens in faraway places but inside each and every one of us- the struggle between Good and Evil, which must go on its weary way till the end of time, is a daily combat in our own souls, where we must take up our arms every day. But is this therefore a cause for despair, that human nature is so fatally corrupt that war and violence must always have their sway? Will the promises of the Apocalypse never come true? The answer lies in our reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. This endless tension within us between impulses to do the right thing by God and by others and urges to have our selfish way no matter what can be reconciled, has been reconciled if we will only allow ourselves to co-operate with God’s endless grace- we must trust in “Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation”. The first step towards peace, the peace of the world we all long for – and every Mass after all is explicitly offered “to advance the peace and salvation of all the world” as Canon III has it – is peace within ourselves, peace between me and God. Only then is there a chance that there may come peace on a larger scale, and we will experience rather than just glimpse the true and lasting peace, “the peace that the world cannot give” only Jesus, whose words we hear at every Mass “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” On this day when we recall with sorrow the appalling loss of life in the two world wars of the last century let us pray that such sacrifices were not in vain, and that the human race will learn its sobering lesson from them, and as our small part let us renew our own commitment to peace- peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbours, peace in the world, but first of all, peace with God. Amen.
Homily for 25 Oct 2009
Homily for 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 25 October 2009
Today’s Gospel reading about the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus can only be properly understood if we put it in its context in Mark’s Gospel – it comes at the very end of Jesus’s ministry of preaching and healing, as he leaves Galilee, which has been the scene of his ministry so far, and heads for Jerusalem, where events will have their momentum and bring him to the climax of his earthly career, his Passion and Resurrection. This is the end of chapter 10, and chapter 11 begins with Jesus preparing to enter the Holy City, sending two disciples to find the ass he will ride on. So this meeting with Bartimaeus is the occasion of the last miracle that Jesus performs before he enters into his final days on earth, when he is caught up in the Passion that he had been predicting all along to the disciples.
The same chapter, chapter 10 has two other important stories, which we have heard the last two Sundays at Mass. First of all there was a man with every advantage in life- youth and wealth-who approached Our Lord and was thinking of joining him, and our Lord was attracted to him and was ready to welcome him into his band of followers – but, do you remember, the young man couldn’t make the kind of radical change that would be necessary in his life, there were just too many things that he was attached to, things that got in the way, things that he was not prepared to give up, and so he didn’t take up Our Lord’s offer and went his own way. And then we saw last week how even the people who have made a real commitment to Our Lord and who are among his closest friends- James and John- still get things wrong, still fail to understand what Our Lord is really about, what his message really is, what following him will really involve. Do you remember, they say, when you start running the show, when your regime really takes off, can we have the top jobs? And Jesus, shaking his head wearily as he realises that no one seems to be getting the point of what he’s been saying at all, says “You do not know what you are asking”.
But this final story today is quite different, a refreshing note to end the ministry on for Our Lord. Bartimaeus is someone who hasn’t got much going for him –he hasn’t had much of a start in life, he has gone blind and scrapes a precarious living begging by the roadside. He may be blind, but he is certainly intelligent and has the eye of faith- because when the crowd tell him that this passer-by that all the fuss is about is Jesus of Nazareth, notice that he does not then shout out “Jesus of Nazareth!” but “Son of David, Jesus!” He does not just repeat what he has been told, by the people around him who think that this Jesus is just another wandering prophet, another healer grabbing the headlines, or another political activist on his way to stage some great demo, no- he realises that this person is none other than the promised Messiah-“Son of David!” he calls out, the first person apart from Peter so far to give Our Lord this title, to recognise the divine nature of Our Lord. People try to shut him up, but he calls all the louder- how pleasing for Our Lord, after all the hesitations of the rich young man with his cautious questions, that here at last is someone showing a bit of eagerness, someone actually keen! And Our Lord stops and responds- “Call him here!” And look at the reaction of Bartimaeus when the call comes, when Jesus extends the possibility of meeting him- “throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus”. Now what is this cloak? Scholars tell us that this wasn’t really something he wore, but something he used to beg, it was usual in those times (what am I saying, I saw it on tube the other day!) for someone begging to lay their coat down in front of the, with the coins on it that people had given them, to encourage others to give. What Bartimaeus is throwing away without a second’s thought is his livelihood, the way he lives, the whole apparatus of his way of life up to that point. How unlike the young man who couldn’t take his mind off his current way of life. For Bartimaeus, he has met the Lord, the Lord is calling him, and he lets go of everything. What faith he must have had! No wonder that Our Lord, in giving him back his sight, exclaims “Your faith has saved you”. And now there is the further reaction of Bartimaeus to consider. He doesn’t go back and pick up the cloak with its coins, he doesn’t go off as other people have done in the Gospel who have been healed to run and show off to loads of people, he no longer seems to have thought of anything other than being with Our Lord- “he followed him along the road”, in other words he gave himself up from that moment on to leading the Christian life, the “way” as already by the time Mark wrote this, our Faith was being called.
The Fathers of the Church in the early centuries loved this Gospel and many of them have left us their homilies on it. Among them I want to end with quoting from St Cyril, the fifth century bishop of Alexandria, one of the great theologians of his day, who draws the contrast between the crowd around Jesus who could see him but didn’t realise who he was, and Bartimaeus who “felt his presence, and laid hold of him with his heart whom his eye could not see”. That is a great phrase isn’t it and one for us- we are not living during the time that Jesus walked the earth and our eyes cannot see him. But we have our Faith and by it we recognise Our Lord, as the disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of Bread. In the Blessed Sacrament we can feel his presence. Soon the bread and wine offered on our altar will become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will be supernaturally among us, he will be passing by Lewisham just as he passed in this story by Jericho. There will be that moment, at communion time, when Our Lord will be passing along our altar rails to meet us. The priest will say “Behold the Lamb of God” but underneath those words we may hear other words, the words of this Gospel :“Courage, get up, he is calling you!” Let us examine our lives afresh and ask ourselves if we have a cloak that we need to throw off, if there is something, some attitude, some attachment, that is holding us back, that is preventing us from accepting the invitation of Our Lord to follow him, that is hindering us from making the wholehearted response we know we should. Does it seem daunting, we may like that old cloak, it is so familiar. We are so used to it, we can hardly imagine doing without it. But what are those words again “Courage, get up, he is calling you!” May we come in answer to Our Lord’s appeal, and, like Bartimaeus, let us, in St Cyril’s words, lay hold on him with our hearts whom our eyes cannot see. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading about the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus can only be properly understood if we put it in its context in Mark’s Gospel – it comes at the very end of Jesus’s ministry of preaching and healing, as he leaves Galilee, which has been the scene of his ministry so far, and heads for Jerusalem, where events will have their momentum and bring him to the climax of his earthly career, his Passion and Resurrection. This is the end of chapter 10, and chapter 11 begins with Jesus preparing to enter the Holy City, sending two disciples to find the ass he will ride on. So this meeting with Bartimaeus is the occasion of the last miracle that Jesus performs before he enters into his final days on earth, when he is caught up in the Passion that he had been predicting all along to the disciples.
The same chapter, chapter 10 has two other important stories, which we have heard the last two Sundays at Mass. First of all there was a man with every advantage in life- youth and wealth-who approached Our Lord and was thinking of joining him, and our Lord was attracted to him and was ready to welcome him into his band of followers – but, do you remember, the young man couldn’t make the kind of radical change that would be necessary in his life, there were just too many things that he was attached to, things that got in the way, things that he was not prepared to give up, and so he didn’t take up Our Lord’s offer and went his own way. And then we saw last week how even the people who have made a real commitment to Our Lord and who are among his closest friends- James and John- still get things wrong, still fail to understand what Our Lord is really about, what his message really is, what following him will really involve. Do you remember, they say, when you start running the show, when your regime really takes off, can we have the top jobs? And Jesus, shaking his head wearily as he realises that no one seems to be getting the point of what he’s been saying at all, says “You do not know what you are asking”.
But this final story today is quite different, a refreshing note to end the ministry on for Our Lord. Bartimaeus is someone who hasn’t got much going for him –he hasn’t had much of a start in life, he has gone blind and scrapes a precarious living begging by the roadside. He may be blind, but he is certainly intelligent and has the eye of faith- because when the crowd tell him that this passer-by that all the fuss is about is Jesus of Nazareth, notice that he does not then shout out “Jesus of Nazareth!” but “Son of David, Jesus!” He does not just repeat what he has been told, by the people around him who think that this Jesus is just another wandering prophet, another healer grabbing the headlines, or another political activist on his way to stage some great demo, no- he realises that this person is none other than the promised Messiah-“Son of David!” he calls out, the first person apart from Peter so far to give Our Lord this title, to recognise the divine nature of Our Lord. People try to shut him up, but he calls all the louder- how pleasing for Our Lord, after all the hesitations of the rich young man with his cautious questions, that here at last is someone showing a bit of eagerness, someone actually keen! And Our Lord stops and responds- “Call him here!” And look at the reaction of Bartimaeus when the call comes, when Jesus extends the possibility of meeting him- “throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus”. Now what is this cloak? Scholars tell us that this wasn’t really something he wore, but something he used to beg, it was usual in those times (what am I saying, I saw it on tube the other day!) for someone begging to lay their coat down in front of the, with the coins on it that people had given them, to encourage others to give. What Bartimaeus is throwing away without a second’s thought is his livelihood, the way he lives, the whole apparatus of his way of life up to that point. How unlike the young man who couldn’t take his mind off his current way of life. For Bartimaeus, he has met the Lord, the Lord is calling him, and he lets go of everything. What faith he must have had! No wonder that Our Lord, in giving him back his sight, exclaims “Your faith has saved you”. And now there is the further reaction of Bartimaeus to consider. He doesn’t go back and pick up the cloak with its coins, he doesn’t go off as other people have done in the Gospel who have been healed to run and show off to loads of people, he no longer seems to have thought of anything other than being with Our Lord- “he followed him along the road”, in other words he gave himself up from that moment on to leading the Christian life, the “way” as already by the time Mark wrote this, our Faith was being called.
The Fathers of the Church in the early centuries loved this Gospel and many of them have left us their homilies on it. Among them I want to end with quoting from St Cyril, the fifth century bishop of Alexandria, one of the great theologians of his day, who draws the contrast between the crowd around Jesus who could see him but didn’t realise who he was, and Bartimaeus who “felt his presence, and laid hold of him with his heart whom his eye could not see”. That is a great phrase isn’t it and one for us- we are not living during the time that Jesus walked the earth and our eyes cannot see him. But we have our Faith and by it we recognise Our Lord, as the disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of Bread. In the Blessed Sacrament we can feel his presence. Soon the bread and wine offered on our altar will become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will be supernaturally among us, he will be passing by Lewisham just as he passed in this story by Jericho. There will be that moment, at communion time, when Our Lord will be passing along our altar rails to meet us. The priest will say “Behold the Lamb of God” but underneath those words we may hear other words, the words of this Gospel :“Courage, get up, he is calling you!” Let us examine our lives afresh and ask ourselves if we have a cloak that we need to throw off, if there is something, some attitude, some attachment, that is holding us back, that is preventing us from accepting the invitation of Our Lord to follow him, that is hindering us from making the wholehearted response we know we should. Does it seem daunting, we may like that old cloak, it is so familiar. We are so used to it, we can hardly imagine doing without it. But what are those words again “Courage, get up, he is calling you!” May we come in answer to Our Lord’s appeal, and, like Bartimaeus, let us, in St Cyril’s words, lay hold on him with our hearts whom our eyes cannot see. Amen.
Sunday 23 August 2009
Homily for 9 august 2009
Homily for Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 9 August 2009
Today’s Gospel is part of a whole series of readings on the theme of the Eucharist that in Year B the Church asks us to reflect upon week by week in the summer. Two weeks ago we have seen how Our Lord is there to nourish us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, how Our Lord has compassion on the hunger of the people and feeds them- he sees their hunger for what it really is, a hunger for spiritual things, for something, someone, that will nourish the soul and bring us to our true stature as children of God. We saw in that Gospel too that Our Lord is generous in his love, that his care of us exceeds all that we could imagine or expect, because not only is everyone fed in that story, there are the twelve baskets still left over, there is more, always more to come for us from the love of God. Last week we heard Jesus say “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry”. He spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to search for the “food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering” – not to limit their horizons simply to satisfying their hunger for the things of this world,, their appetites for material things, things that come and go, that pass away, but to aim higher, to address that other appetite that is within each one of us, that hunger for a connexion with the divine, that yearning for our life to have meaning, meaning in the sight of God, real meaning and not just the labels of fantasy that we may imagine we have. And we heard last week how at the end of Our Lord’s discourse, even though they hardly knew what they said, the crowd cried out “Sir, give us that bread always!” - a little phrase that it is good to repeat sometimes as we approach the moment of Communion- “Lord, give us that bread always!”
But what is the Bread? What does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd “I am the bread of life”? In today’s Gospel he expounds this further- “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and he tells them that “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Not only is Jesus providing the nourishment we need but he actually in some way is the nourishment. No wonder, in the very next verse that follows this Gospel, we read that many of the disciples didn’t like the sound of it-“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” and at the end of this chapter 6 the evangelist tells us that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with him”. The idea that somehow Jesus would give his body to be eaten by his followers is still quite a shocking, bizarre idea today. To his Jewish hearers it was appalling, because they had a long tradition of this being the ultimate degradation for an enemy who had been killed, the ultimate horror for a sinner who died in his sins. The prophet Ezekiel (39:17-20) in one of his oracles has God telling man to get ready for the day when the enemies of God will be slain, to tell all the birds and all the animals to come to this great feast- “gather from all sides” says God “to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast…and you shall eat flesh and drink blood, you shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth”.
And so when Our Lord is saying that the bread that he will give is his flesh, he is referring to his coming death on the Cross. He will be slain, he will die not as a sinner dying in his sins, but as the all-innocent one dying in our sins. And just as the body of the hated enemy will be exposed to be eaten, so too the body of the One whom mankind rejected and to whom such hostility was shown in the Passion and Crucifixion will be offered to be eaten. In a sense, for Our Lord, the constant giving of himself to us in Holy Communion is an ongoing part of the Passion, an ongoing vulnerability, an ongoing putting of himself in our hands to see what we will do with him. And Ezekiel’s prophecy comes true for us at every Mass- the Mass is “the sacrificial feast” that God says he is preparing for us. “You shall be filled at my table” he says, “you shall eat the flesh of the mighty”- we know that Jesus is the mighty, he is God the Son of the Father- “you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth”- well, we consume the body and blood, soul and divinity of not a prince of this world, but the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe. And God says again via Ezekiel “You shall eat till you are filled”.
We cannot easily comprehend how this happens, how it is that the bread offered on our altars by our priests is changed in its essence by the words of consecration into the Body of Christ, the bread that I shall give which is my flesh for the life of the world. We can use technical terms like transubstantiation if that helps us, we can learn the definitions in the catechisms old and new, but in the end, however clever we are, however blessed with insight we are, we have to go on faith alone. This is what we believe, what the Church has always believed, and we take it on trust, the trust that we call the Faith that comes to us from the apostles. And that is what Our Lord was looking for in his discourse in today’s Gospel, that is the reaction he wanted from his audience- he was hoping for the response of Faith- “I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life” Our Lord knows that faith is not always easy, that it is a grace, a gift from God- he speaks here of those who do believe as being “drawn by the Father” and “taught by God”- to have this kind of faith, this trusting confidence in God’s words, is “to hear the teaching of the Father and learn from it”, Jesus tells us- and that means inevitably “to come to me”.
These Gospel passages contain “hard sayings” indeed, but let us not be among those who draw back because we do not understand and cannot accept these awe-inspiring words and their still shocking meaning. Let us instead accept the invitation of God that he gives in Ezekiel and “gather from all sides to the great sacrificial feast” that he is preparing for us, let us come to Communion to have our hunger for God’s love satisfied and to absorb into our human lives the divine life, “the flesh of the mighty”. Lord, give us this bread always! Amen.
Today’s Gospel is part of a whole series of readings on the theme of the Eucharist that in Year B the Church asks us to reflect upon week by week in the summer. Two weeks ago we have seen how Our Lord is there to nourish us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, how Our Lord has compassion on the hunger of the people and feeds them- he sees their hunger for what it really is, a hunger for spiritual things, for something, someone, that will nourish the soul and bring us to our true stature as children of God. We saw in that Gospel too that Our Lord is generous in his love, that his care of us exceeds all that we could imagine or expect, because not only is everyone fed in that story, there are the twelve baskets still left over, there is more, always more to come for us from the love of God. Last week we heard Jesus say “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry”. He spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to search for the “food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering” – not to limit their horizons simply to satisfying their hunger for the things of this world,, their appetites for material things, things that come and go, that pass away, but to aim higher, to address that other appetite that is within each one of us, that hunger for a connexion with the divine, that yearning for our life to have meaning, meaning in the sight of God, real meaning and not just the labels of fantasy that we may imagine we have. And we heard last week how at the end of Our Lord’s discourse, even though they hardly knew what they said, the crowd cried out “Sir, give us that bread always!” - a little phrase that it is good to repeat sometimes as we approach the moment of Communion- “Lord, give us that bread always!”
But what is the Bread? What does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd “I am the bread of life”? In today’s Gospel he expounds this further- “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and he tells them that “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Not only is Jesus providing the nourishment we need but he actually in some way is the nourishment. No wonder, in the very next verse that follows this Gospel, we read that many of the disciples didn’t like the sound of it-“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” and at the end of this chapter 6 the evangelist tells us that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with him”. The idea that somehow Jesus would give his body to be eaten by his followers is still quite a shocking, bizarre idea today. To his Jewish hearers it was appalling, because they had a long tradition of this being the ultimate degradation for an enemy who had been killed, the ultimate horror for a sinner who died in his sins. The prophet Ezekiel (39:17-20) in one of his oracles has God telling man to get ready for the day when the enemies of God will be slain, to tell all the birds and all the animals to come to this great feast- “gather from all sides” says God “to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast…and you shall eat flesh and drink blood, you shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth”.
And so when Our Lord is saying that the bread that he will give is his flesh, he is referring to his coming death on the Cross. He will be slain, he will die not as a sinner dying in his sins, but as the all-innocent one dying in our sins. And just as the body of the hated enemy will be exposed to be eaten, so too the body of the One whom mankind rejected and to whom such hostility was shown in the Passion and Crucifixion will be offered to be eaten. In a sense, for Our Lord, the constant giving of himself to us in Holy Communion is an ongoing part of the Passion, an ongoing vulnerability, an ongoing putting of himself in our hands to see what we will do with him. And Ezekiel’s prophecy comes true for us at every Mass- the Mass is “the sacrificial feast” that God says he is preparing for us. “You shall be filled at my table” he says, “you shall eat the flesh of the mighty”- we know that Jesus is the mighty, he is God the Son of the Father- “you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth”- well, we consume the body and blood, soul and divinity of not a prince of this world, but the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe. And God says again via Ezekiel “You shall eat till you are filled”.
We cannot easily comprehend how this happens, how it is that the bread offered on our altars by our priests is changed in its essence by the words of consecration into the Body of Christ, the bread that I shall give which is my flesh for the life of the world. We can use technical terms like transubstantiation if that helps us, we can learn the definitions in the catechisms old and new, but in the end, however clever we are, however blessed with insight we are, we have to go on faith alone. This is what we believe, what the Church has always believed, and we take it on trust, the trust that we call the Faith that comes to us from the apostles. And that is what Our Lord was looking for in his discourse in today’s Gospel, that is the reaction he wanted from his audience- he was hoping for the response of Faith- “I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life” Our Lord knows that faith is not always easy, that it is a grace, a gift from God- he speaks here of those who do believe as being “drawn by the Father” and “taught by God”- to have this kind of faith, this trusting confidence in God’s words, is “to hear the teaching of the Father and learn from it”, Jesus tells us- and that means inevitably “to come to me”.
These Gospel passages contain “hard sayings” indeed, but let us not be among those who draw back because we do not understand and cannot accept these awe-inspiring words and their still shocking meaning. Let us instead accept the invitation of God that he gives in Ezekiel and “gather from all sides to the great sacrificial feast” that he is preparing for us, let us come to Communion to have our hunger for God’s love satisfied and to absorb into our human lives the divine life, “the flesh of the mighty”. Lord, give us this bread always! Amen.
Homily for 23 August 2009
Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 23 August 2009
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
Sunday 29 March 2009
homily for Lent V 2009
Homily for Lent V Year B Sunday 29 March 2009
Today’s Gospel describes a turning point in John’s account of the ministry of Jesus as the momentum of events gathers pace that will bring him to his death. The important thing here is mentioned right at the start of the passage we have just heard: some Greeks came to find out who Jesus was. Now we can see from the Greek word used by the evangelist that these Greeks are not Greek-speaking Jews, they are not members of the nation of Israel, they are Gentiles. All through his ministry, as described in all the gospels, Our Lord is shown as addressing himself to the Jewish people- as St Paul reminds us in Romans “They are Israelites and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises” and so they have to come first, the message of salvation must be heard by them first, that is their right. Occasionally we see a Gentile trying to get to Jesus for healing, to gatecrash, as it were, the wonderful events that are happening wherever Jesus goes. You remember when Jesus went up into the region of Tyre and Sidon- modern Lebanon- and there was that woman who came and begged him to heal her little daughter- Mark tells us “now the woman was a Greek, a Syro-phoenician by birth”. Our Lord begins by saying to her “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. She wins him over, doesn’t she, by her clever reply:”Yes, lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”. (Mk 7) This story is making the point that in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry the Jews must come first- the food of his word is meant for them. If they don’t want it, well, then we’ll see… Of course there is no suggestion that somehow the rest of the world wasn’t going to have their turn, only that the Jewish people must have the first chance. If we were in any doubt about this, Mark follows this story with the Feeding of the Five Thousand- which shows the Jewish crowd fed- it says “and they ate and were satisfied” and then adds that “they took up the broken pieces left over”- the crumbs under the table, in other words- “seven baskets full”. In John’s account (Jn 6) there is even more: the disciples gather up all the crumbs, because Jesus says nothing must be lost, and they fill twelve baskets! The message is: after the Jews have had their fill, there is still an abundance to satisfy the rest of the world. But the point I want to make is, that Jesus is concentrating primarily on the Chosen People in his ministry.
All that is going to change of course, as we know- the Jews reject Our Lord, a great sorrow to him every time he reflects on it and every time their unwillingness to accept him becomes more apparent. The future lies with the Gentiles. And now, as today’s Gospel shows us, this sea change is beginning. A group of Gentiles come, via Philip, to find Jesus. Philip has a Greek name, and comes from Bethsaida, which was a predominantly Gentile area, and was almost certainly a Greek speaker, so it is perhaps inevitable that they should use him as a go-between. Their request is so simple and direct; “we should like to see Jesus”. Their arrival is seen by Jesus as a sign of such importance, that he says “Now the hour has come!” He recognises that things are moving into place, the reluctance of the Jews to believe in him is being replaced by the eagerness of the Gentile world to accept him. Many times in this Gospel Our Lord has spoken about his time, his hour- he has repeatedly told the disciples that the time is not ripe, that the hour is not yet. You remember how at the wedding at Cana, he turned to Our Lady and said “My hour has not yet come” and when he first went to Jerusalem with his disciples, at a time when John tells us that “even his brothers did not believe in him” (Jn 7 v) he said almost as an excuse for nothing happening “My time has not yet come”. The evangelist says a bit later that they tried to arrest him on that occasion “but no one laid hands on him because his hour had not yet come”. (7 xxx) But we are much further on in the story by now, and Jesus has just made his final entry into the city, with all the palms and the hosannas, now the time is right, now things will happen, and happen fast. “Now the hour has come” says Jesus, who knows what path he is now treading, where events will now quickly lead him. He is truly human as well as truly divine, and so we should not be surprised that he has a purely human reaction to the prospect of the death that awaits him, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us in our second reading, praying “aloud and in silent tears” and here he cries out “Now my soul is troubled”. But how can he ask to avoid it- “it was for this very reason that I have come to this hour!”
And so what is the “hour” that we have heard so much about? It is of course the death of Jesus, the crucifixion, that supreme act of self-sacrifice, the “lifting up” that I spoke about last week- “and when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself” Jesus speaks here of his death being like the seed that dies in the ground, the seed that will then bear fruit and “yield a rich harvest”, the dying that will in fact be life-giving, and life-giving for all the peoples of the earth, not just for one. But the crucifixion, if it is the hour of Jesus, is also the hour, the critical moment, for each one of us too- as Jesus says, “Now sentence is being passed on the world”- now we come into court, now is our moment of judgement, of waiting for the sentence of God on us. Our Lord is indeed drawing everyone to him, offering us his open arms of love, whoever we are, wherever we’ve come from, whatever we’ve done- but we must respond! It is on our response that we shall be judged, when “the sentence is being passed on this world”. What was our response to our Lord, to his message? Did we accept him, or was it all too much trouble to take him seriously?
At every Mass we step outside time and come to the Last Supper and to Calvary, to re-enact that sacrifice of love. Now the hour has come, and here we are, like those Greeks of two thousand years ago. We turn to our priest with the same eager longing, the same humble request- “We should like to see Jesus” and at the words of consecration that he will utter, we will, and in that seeing, in that gazing upon his Body, broken for us, may we renew our commitment to follow him. Dear Jesus, give us the crumbs under your table, and when you are lifted up, draw us all to yourself; as “sentence is being passed on this world” “forgive (our) iniquity and never call (our) sin to mind”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel describes a turning point in John’s account of the ministry of Jesus as the momentum of events gathers pace that will bring him to his death. The important thing here is mentioned right at the start of the passage we have just heard: some Greeks came to find out who Jesus was. Now we can see from the Greek word used by the evangelist that these Greeks are not Greek-speaking Jews, they are not members of the nation of Israel, they are Gentiles. All through his ministry, as described in all the gospels, Our Lord is shown as addressing himself to the Jewish people- as St Paul reminds us in Romans “They are Israelites and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises” and so they have to come first, the message of salvation must be heard by them first, that is their right. Occasionally we see a Gentile trying to get to Jesus for healing, to gatecrash, as it were, the wonderful events that are happening wherever Jesus goes. You remember when Jesus went up into the region of Tyre and Sidon- modern Lebanon- and there was that woman who came and begged him to heal her little daughter- Mark tells us “now the woman was a Greek, a Syro-phoenician by birth”. Our Lord begins by saying to her “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. She wins him over, doesn’t she, by her clever reply:”Yes, lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”. (Mk 7) This story is making the point that in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry the Jews must come first- the food of his word is meant for them. If they don’t want it, well, then we’ll see… Of course there is no suggestion that somehow the rest of the world wasn’t going to have their turn, only that the Jewish people must have the first chance. If we were in any doubt about this, Mark follows this story with the Feeding of the Five Thousand- which shows the Jewish crowd fed- it says “and they ate and were satisfied” and then adds that “they took up the broken pieces left over”- the crumbs under the table, in other words- “seven baskets full”. In John’s account (Jn 6) there is even more: the disciples gather up all the crumbs, because Jesus says nothing must be lost, and they fill twelve baskets! The message is: after the Jews have had their fill, there is still an abundance to satisfy the rest of the world. But the point I want to make is, that Jesus is concentrating primarily on the Chosen People in his ministry.
All that is going to change of course, as we know- the Jews reject Our Lord, a great sorrow to him every time he reflects on it and every time their unwillingness to accept him becomes more apparent. The future lies with the Gentiles. And now, as today’s Gospel shows us, this sea change is beginning. A group of Gentiles come, via Philip, to find Jesus. Philip has a Greek name, and comes from Bethsaida, which was a predominantly Gentile area, and was almost certainly a Greek speaker, so it is perhaps inevitable that they should use him as a go-between. Their request is so simple and direct; “we should like to see Jesus”. Their arrival is seen by Jesus as a sign of such importance, that he says “Now the hour has come!” He recognises that things are moving into place, the reluctance of the Jews to believe in him is being replaced by the eagerness of the Gentile world to accept him. Many times in this Gospel Our Lord has spoken about his time, his hour- he has repeatedly told the disciples that the time is not ripe, that the hour is not yet. You remember how at the wedding at Cana, he turned to Our Lady and said “My hour has not yet come” and when he first went to Jerusalem with his disciples, at a time when John tells us that “even his brothers did not believe in him” (Jn 7 v) he said almost as an excuse for nothing happening “My time has not yet come”. The evangelist says a bit later that they tried to arrest him on that occasion “but no one laid hands on him because his hour had not yet come”. (7 xxx) But we are much further on in the story by now, and Jesus has just made his final entry into the city, with all the palms and the hosannas, now the time is right, now things will happen, and happen fast. “Now the hour has come” says Jesus, who knows what path he is now treading, where events will now quickly lead him. He is truly human as well as truly divine, and so we should not be surprised that he has a purely human reaction to the prospect of the death that awaits him, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us in our second reading, praying “aloud and in silent tears” and here he cries out “Now my soul is troubled”. But how can he ask to avoid it- “it was for this very reason that I have come to this hour!”
And so what is the “hour” that we have heard so much about? It is of course the death of Jesus, the crucifixion, that supreme act of self-sacrifice, the “lifting up” that I spoke about last week- “and when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself” Jesus speaks here of his death being like the seed that dies in the ground, the seed that will then bear fruit and “yield a rich harvest”, the dying that will in fact be life-giving, and life-giving for all the peoples of the earth, not just for one. But the crucifixion, if it is the hour of Jesus, is also the hour, the critical moment, for each one of us too- as Jesus says, “Now sentence is being passed on the world”- now we come into court, now is our moment of judgement, of waiting for the sentence of God on us. Our Lord is indeed drawing everyone to him, offering us his open arms of love, whoever we are, wherever we’ve come from, whatever we’ve done- but we must respond! It is on our response that we shall be judged, when “the sentence is being passed on this world”. What was our response to our Lord, to his message? Did we accept him, or was it all too much trouble to take him seriously?
At every Mass we step outside time and come to the Last Supper and to Calvary, to re-enact that sacrifice of love. Now the hour has come, and here we are, like those Greeks of two thousand years ago. We turn to our priest with the same eager longing, the same humble request- “We should like to see Jesus” and at the words of consecration that he will utter, we will, and in that seeing, in that gazing upon his Body, broken for us, may we renew our commitment to follow him. Dear Jesus, give us the crumbs under your table, and when you are lifted up, draw us all to yourself; as “sentence is being passed on this world” “forgive (our) iniquity and never call (our) sin to mind”. Amen.
homily for Lent IV 2009
Homily for Lent IV 22 March 2009
Today’s Gospel starts with the phrase “The Son of Man must be lifted up”. The evangelist is saying that when Our Lord will be lifted up, or better because Our Lord will be lifted up, then we will have eternal life- somehow the lifting up will be the moment, the event that will bring the possibility of eternal life, that is, of our reconciliation with God. This is the first of three occasions in John’s Gospel where this phrase “lifted up” is used. Later on, when we find Jesus being cross-questioned by a crowd of Jews, in chapter 8 of the Gospel, and they ask him “Who are you?” (8;25), he tells them “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know” making it clear that somehow his full identity will only be made known in this lifting up, that this act of being lifted up, of allowing himself to be lifted up, will be Jesus being his most authentic- only then will we see who Jesus really is, what his life and mission have been really about- what in other words, Jesus is for…. And thirdly, we find this phrase again in chapter 12, when the events of Holy Week are beginning to gather momentum and the crowd is flocking round him because they have all heard he has just raised Lazarus from the dead and they are hanging on his words in a mood of curiosity that may go sour at any moment. Jesus is having his moment of purely human fear and anxiety at his fast approaching death. “Now is my soul troubled” he says, as he prepares to submit himself to all the injustice that is coming to him- “Now is the judgement of this world.” (12:31-32) He goes on “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself”. What does “lifted up” mean then? Well, Our Lord himself explains it, because the next thing we read (v33) is “He said this to show by what death he was to die”. It is – as I am sure you have understood all along- all about the cross, Our Lord’s death on the cross.
Now the next phrase we need to look at is this bit about Moses- “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. What is that about? Well, it refers to a story told in the book of Numbers chapter 21. The Children of Israel are still wandering round and round the Sinai peninsula at this point, still being led by Moses and gradually being turned by his influence from the “mixed multitude” of slaves who left Egypt into a group of people with their own clear identity, the Chosen People of God. They got more and more fed up of course as time went on, with all this wandering- it must have been a bit like a holiday that has gone wrong- marvellous when you start out, but now the novelty has worn off and you get hot and tired and grumpy! You know what I mean I’m sure- that moment when you’re sick of all this foreign food and all you want is a nice cup of tea. The Book of Numbers says “the people became impatient on the way” and they said to Moses “What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and water and we loathe this worthless food!” I’ve been on tours like that! They were eaten up, in a sense, with bitterness and anger, and the next thing that happens is that a lot of them get bitten by “fiery serpents” and die- the poison of these deeply destructive emotions- resentment and rage- kills. The people realise, a bit late it’s true, how wrong they have been to harbour all these negative self-centred and self-pitying thoughts, they have seen that they will bring about our death if we let them take us over and let their venom course through our veins unchecked. “Pray to the Lord” they beg Moses “that he take away the serpents from us”. And what happens next is that God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”. And after that if anyone was bitten by one of these snakes, he just had to fix his gaze on the bronze serpent and he would be cured.
What lessons for us lie in this ancient story! The destructive power of bitterness, that warps and withers the personality, is indeed a killer, a snake spreading its poison in our lives. Along with it go those other snakes in the same family, self-pity and ill humour. We all know people who are always complaining, always angry about something or another, always in a bad mood- how boring they are, how we try to avoid them, but what a prison they have created for themselves by getting stuck in such modes of thought, what a death sentence they have passed on themselves when they decide that this is me, I rather like being this self-important never satisfied Mr Grumpy.- or Mrs Grumpy indeed, or Sister Grumpy, or Father Grumpy. What is the only cure for these dangerous, indeed fatal, diseases, for this snakebite of rancour? How can we be inoculated against the fiery serpents, because we need to be- we may not be in the wilderness any more but there are plenty of fiery serpents lying in wait for us right here in Lewisham! They can jump out when we least expect it, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlooked for moments, for “There is no place where Temptation does not have access” as St Francis de Sales once said.
The answer of course, is the Cross- just as in the wilderness anyone looking at the bronze serpent was cured of his snakebite, so looking at the Cross we are brought up face to face with the love of God for us and the price Our Lord paid to reconcile the human race afresh to its loving Creator. The Cross shows us – as Our Lord had predicted in the Gospel- who Jesus really was, and what God wanted to show us through his earthly life and death. It is what St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians that we heard at Mass last week: “ Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles….Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Face to face with this total sacrifice, the final proof of God’s radical love for us and the lengths to which he will go for us and with us, our soul searching must begin in earnest and like the baby Hercules, we will want to reach out and strangle the serpents ourselves before they do any more damage to us. Here in the crucifix we see selfless love and willing surrender, and when we hold the Cross up as a mirror to our own lives, may it cause in us a reflection of God’s generosity and goodness. Lord Jesus, we make the same prayer this morning as the Children of Israel did all those centuries ago- “take away the serpents from us”, free us from the poison of rancour, and help us to look upon your Cross, and you lifted up on it, to let ourselves be drawn into your life. Amen.
Today’s Gospel starts with the phrase “The Son of Man must be lifted up”. The evangelist is saying that when Our Lord will be lifted up, or better because Our Lord will be lifted up, then we will have eternal life- somehow the lifting up will be the moment, the event that will bring the possibility of eternal life, that is, of our reconciliation with God. This is the first of three occasions in John’s Gospel where this phrase “lifted up” is used. Later on, when we find Jesus being cross-questioned by a crowd of Jews, in chapter 8 of the Gospel, and they ask him “Who are you?” (8;25), he tells them “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know” making it clear that somehow his full identity will only be made known in this lifting up, that this act of being lifted up, of allowing himself to be lifted up, will be Jesus being his most authentic- only then will we see who Jesus really is, what his life and mission have been really about- what in other words, Jesus is for…. And thirdly, we find this phrase again in chapter 12, when the events of Holy Week are beginning to gather momentum and the crowd is flocking round him because they have all heard he has just raised Lazarus from the dead and they are hanging on his words in a mood of curiosity that may go sour at any moment. Jesus is having his moment of purely human fear and anxiety at his fast approaching death. “Now is my soul troubled” he says, as he prepares to submit himself to all the injustice that is coming to him- “Now is the judgement of this world.” (12:31-32) He goes on “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself”. What does “lifted up” mean then? Well, Our Lord himself explains it, because the next thing we read (v33) is “He said this to show by what death he was to die”. It is – as I am sure you have understood all along- all about the cross, Our Lord’s death on the cross.
Now the next phrase we need to look at is this bit about Moses- “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. What is that about? Well, it refers to a story told in the book of Numbers chapter 21. The Children of Israel are still wandering round and round the Sinai peninsula at this point, still being led by Moses and gradually being turned by his influence from the “mixed multitude” of slaves who left Egypt into a group of people with their own clear identity, the Chosen People of God. They got more and more fed up of course as time went on, with all this wandering- it must have been a bit like a holiday that has gone wrong- marvellous when you start out, but now the novelty has worn off and you get hot and tired and grumpy! You know what I mean I’m sure- that moment when you’re sick of all this foreign food and all you want is a nice cup of tea. The Book of Numbers says “the people became impatient on the way” and they said to Moses “What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and water and we loathe this worthless food!” I’ve been on tours like that! They were eaten up, in a sense, with bitterness and anger, and the next thing that happens is that a lot of them get bitten by “fiery serpents” and die- the poison of these deeply destructive emotions- resentment and rage- kills. The people realise, a bit late it’s true, how wrong they have been to harbour all these negative self-centred and self-pitying thoughts, they have seen that they will bring about our death if we let them take us over and let their venom course through our veins unchecked. “Pray to the Lord” they beg Moses “that he take away the serpents from us”. And what happens next is that God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”. And after that if anyone was bitten by one of these snakes, he just had to fix his gaze on the bronze serpent and he would be cured.
What lessons for us lie in this ancient story! The destructive power of bitterness, that warps and withers the personality, is indeed a killer, a snake spreading its poison in our lives. Along with it go those other snakes in the same family, self-pity and ill humour. We all know people who are always complaining, always angry about something or another, always in a bad mood- how boring they are, how we try to avoid them, but what a prison they have created for themselves by getting stuck in such modes of thought, what a death sentence they have passed on themselves when they decide that this is me, I rather like being this self-important never satisfied Mr Grumpy.- or Mrs Grumpy indeed, or Sister Grumpy, or Father Grumpy. What is the only cure for these dangerous, indeed fatal, diseases, for this snakebite of rancour? How can we be inoculated against the fiery serpents, because we need to be- we may not be in the wilderness any more but there are plenty of fiery serpents lying in wait for us right here in Lewisham! They can jump out when we least expect it, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlooked for moments, for “There is no place where Temptation does not have access” as St Francis de Sales once said.
The answer of course, is the Cross- just as in the wilderness anyone looking at the bronze serpent was cured of his snakebite, so looking at the Cross we are brought up face to face with the love of God for us and the price Our Lord paid to reconcile the human race afresh to its loving Creator. The Cross shows us – as Our Lord had predicted in the Gospel- who Jesus really was, and what God wanted to show us through his earthly life and death. It is what St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians that we heard at Mass last week: “ Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles….Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Face to face with this total sacrifice, the final proof of God’s radical love for us and the lengths to which he will go for us and with us, our soul searching must begin in earnest and like the baby Hercules, we will want to reach out and strangle the serpents ourselves before they do any more damage to us. Here in the crucifix we see selfless love and willing surrender, and when we hold the Cross up as a mirror to our own lives, may it cause in us a reflection of God’s generosity and goodness. Lord Jesus, we make the same prayer this morning as the Children of Israel did all those centuries ago- “take away the serpents from us”, free us from the poison of rancour, and help us to look upon your Cross, and you lifted up on it, to let ourselves be drawn into your life. Amen.
Monday 16 February 2009
Sixth Sunday of Year B 15 February 2009
Homily for Sixth Sunday of the Year B 15 February 2009
Sometimes when we look at the readings given for a certain Sunday, it is hard for us to see the connection between them, why that Old Testament reading has been chosen and so on. But today the connection is very clear- the ancient laws by which the Jews had to try and live describe in our first reading how anyone with leprosy (that is, not the modern disease we call leprosy, but any one of a number of possible skin diseases) must be kept apart from everyone else and live outside the camp, outside normal society. And in today’s Gospel Jesus is dealing with a leper, who begs him to cure him, to let him regain his place in normal society, to belong again, to come in from the outside. What is the reaction of Jesus?
We need hardly ask! Our Lord’s ministry in Mark’s Gospel is shown above all as one of healing, healing not only of all the bodily ailments that afflict us and hold us back from any sort of physical perfection, but also of the demons, the demons within us, the stresses and phobias, the feelings of guilt and inadequacy, all the mental torments that hold us back too and obscure the person we could be in our full potential. And so Our Lord is very moved when he looks upon this suffering outcast- the translation we have here is hopeless, “feeling sorry for him” does not have any of the force of the Greek word, which means “became extremely emotional”, with a mixture of pity and anger. And he does what no one else would have risked doing- he “stretched out his hand and touched him”. That alone would have sent a frisson round the onlookers- gosh, did you see that, he actually touched him! Do you recall the effect that Princess Diana had back in the mid 80s when AIDS was a new and frightening thing, when she was photographed holding the hand of an AIDS sufferer in hospital? That gesture broke through a lot of the taboos that were building up fast at that time. Our Lord being prepared to touch the leper was already a huge statement, of acceptance, of the renewal of human contact, a sign of the possibility of a return to ordinary society, of belonging again. “If you want to, you can cure me” is the leper’s humble prayer, his hesitant request, which he hardly dares to hope will be answered. There is nothing hesitant, however, about Our Lord’s emphatic reply – “Of course I want to!” But of course this is precisely what Jesus has started his ministry to do- to cure people, to make them well and whole again, to free them from the shackles of disease and sin. “Be cured!” he says “and the leprosy left him at once and he was cured”.
But there is far more in this Gospel passage for us to consider, for what we actually have here is one of the first hints – we are still only in chapter 1 after all!- that Mark gives us of what Jesus’s ministry is really about, and where, with a terrible logic of its own, it will inevitably lead him. Here we see Our Lord gladly, one might even say enthusiastically, curing a leper of his uncleanness. But let us look what happens then to Jesus. What is the result of this welcoming of the outcast back into the fold, this touching of the leper, this healing of the unclean for Our Lord himself? Ironically, the situation is suddenly reversed, for now that the leper is back in society, in a strange way it is Our Lord who is out in the cold- we read “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside”. Our Lord has taken the uncleanness away from this poor leper, and as a result finds himself in the leper’s position, unable to go into the towns and having to keep away from people – it is as if he has taken on the burden of the man he has cured. All this of course resonates with our understanding of Our Lord’s death and resurrection, doesn’t it. Our Lord, taking on the burden of our sins, being “the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” Do you remember what Isaiah prophesised about Our Lord? It is part of the readings we have every Good Friday: “the crowds were appalled on seeing him, so disfigured did he look….and yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried…..Yes, he was torn away from the land of the living, for our faults struck down to death”. We have in today’s Gospel reading a hint of what is to come, of the other side of the coin if you like of the healing and the curing: it all comes at a price, all this healing, all this sorting out of the ills of humanity, all this putting of mankind straight with God once and for all – Jesus will suffer for us, he will be the scapegoat that is turned away into the desert to bear away the sins of the people and die. For where does Jesus eventually meet his death? Where is Calvary? It is “the green hill far away, without a city wall” as the hymn says- it is outside the city, outside the security and order of the city, beyond the walls, where people throw their rubbish and bury their dead, where all the uncleanness is. It is there, beyond the limits of normal society, in the very heart of the uncleanness and impurity of mankind, in the detritus and the wreckage of fallen humanity, that our Lord is driven to his death- driven of course by the Roman soldiers and the authorities who have connived at his death, but driven there ultimately as the inevitable consequence of his life’s work, the impetus of all the healings and of all the saving of souls. This is what lies ahead for Jesus, but we see him today in the very first days of his ministry, full of energy for his work, as Mark depicts him, dashing from one healing to another, full of eagerness to cure whoever presents himself before him.
He is eager still, Our Lord, eager to cure us, to free us from whatever demons torment us and from whatever sins hold us back from becoming our true selves. And we are like that leper, aren’t we: we know our uncleanness, we know our failures, we know the mess we make of things, we know what our own private leprosy is. We too are longing to come in from the cold, to experience the warmth of God’s love, we too are tired of being an outsider, an outcast, we too want to belong, to belong to God, to feel his healing touch in our lives. We too need acceptance. Let us approach Our Lord this morning, and say with that leper “If you want to, you can cure me” and may the Lord in his mercy and love look upon us, stretch out his hand to touch us, and say to us “Be cured!” Amen.
Sometimes when we look at the readings given for a certain Sunday, it is hard for us to see the connection between them, why that Old Testament reading has been chosen and so on. But today the connection is very clear- the ancient laws by which the Jews had to try and live describe in our first reading how anyone with leprosy (that is, not the modern disease we call leprosy, but any one of a number of possible skin diseases) must be kept apart from everyone else and live outside the camp, outside normal society. And in today’s Gospel Jesus is dealing with a leper, who begs him to cure him, to let him regain his place in normal society, to belong again, to come in from the outside. What is the reaction of Jesus?
We need hardly ask! Our Lord’s ministry in Mark’s Gospel is shown above all as one of healing, healing not only of all the bodily ailments that afflict us and hold us back from any sort of physical perfection, but also of the demons, the demons within us, the stresses and phobias, the feelings of guilt and inadequacy, all the mental torments that hold us back too and obscure the person we could be in our full potential. And so Our Lord is very moved when he looks upon this suffering outcast- the translation we have here is hopeless, “feeling sorry for him” does not have any of the force of the Greek word, which means “became extremely emotional”, with a mixture of pity and anger. And he does what no one else would have risked doing- he “stretched out his hand and touched him”. That alone would have sent a frisson round the onlookers- gosh, did you see that, he actually touched him! Do you recall the effect that Princess Diana had back in the mid 80s when AIDS was a new and frightening thing, when she was photographed holding the hand of an AIDS sufferer in hospital? That gesture broke through a lot of the taboos that were building up fast at that time. Our Lord being prepared to touch the leper was already a huge statement, of acceptance, of the renewal of human contact, a sign of the possibility of a return to ordinary society, of belonging again. “If you want to, you can cure me” is the leper’s humble prayer, his hesitant request, which he hardly dares to hope will be answered. There is nothing hesitant, however, about Our Lord’s emphatic reply – “Of course I want to!” But of course this is precisely what Jesus has started his ministry to do- to cure people, to make them well and whole again, to free them from the shackles of disease and sin. “Be cured!” he says “and the leprosy left him at once and he was cured”.
But there is far more in this Gospel passage for us to consider, for what we actually have here is one of the first hints – we are still only in chapter 1 after all!- that Mark gives us of what Jesus’s ministry is really about, and where, with a terrible logic of its own, it will inevitably lead him. Here we see Our Lord gladly, one might even say enthusiastically, curing a leper of his uncleanness. But let us look what happens then to Jesus. What is the result of this welcoming of the outcast back into the fold, this touching of the leper, this healing of the unclean for Our Lord himself? Ironically, the situation is suddenly reversed, for now that the leper is back in society, in a strange way it is Our Lord who is out in the cold- we read “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside”. Our Lord has taken the uncleanness away from this poor leper, and as a result finds himself in the leper’s position, unable to go into the towns and having to keep away from people – it is as if he has taken on the burden of the man he has cured. All this of course resonates with our understanding of Our Lord’s death and resurrection, doesn’t it. Our Lord, taking on the burden of our sins, being “the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” Do you remember what Isaiah prophesised about Our Lord? It is part of the readings we have every Good Friday: “the crowds were appalled on seeing him, so disfigured did he look….and yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried…..Yes, he was torn away from the land of the living, for our faults struck down to death”. We have in today’s Gospel reading a hint of what is to come, of the other side of the coin if you like of the healing and the curing: it all comes at a price, all this healing, all this sorting out of the ills of humanity, all this putting of mankind straight with God once and for all – Jesus will suffer for us, he will be the scapegoat that is turned away into the desert to bear away the sins of the people and die. For where does Jesus eventually meet his death? Where is Calvary? It is “the green hill far away, without a city wall” as the hymn says- it is outside the city, outside the security and order of the city, beyond the walls, where people throw their rubbish and bury their dead, where all the uncleanness is. It is there, beyond the limits of normal society, in the very heart of the uncleanness and impurity of mankind, in the detritus and the wreckage of fallen humanity, that our Lord is driven to his death- driven of course by the Roman soldiers and the authorities who have connived at his death, but driven there ultimately as the inevitable consequence of his life’s work, the impetus of all the healings and of all the saving of souls. This is what lies ahead for Jesus, but we see him today in the very first days of his ministry, full of energy for his work, as Mark depicts him, dashing from one healing to another, full of eagerness to cure whoever presents himself before him.
He is eager still, Our Lord, eager to cure us, to free us from whatever demons torment us and from whatever sins hold us back from becoming our true selves. And we are like that leper, aren’t we: we know our uncleanness, we know our failures, we know the mess we make of things, we know what our own private leprosy is. We too are longing to come in from the cold, to experience the warmth of God’s love, we too are tired of being an outsider, an outcast, we too want to belong, to belong to God, to feel his healing touch in our lives. We too need acceptance. Let us approach Our Lord this morning, and say with that leper “If you want to, you can cure me” and may the Lord in his mercy and love look upon us, stretch out his hand to touch us, and say to us “Be cured!” Amen.
Monday 19 January 2009
Sunday 18 January 2009
Homily for Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 18 January 2009
Last week we had the story of the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, an event which marked the start of Jesus’s ministry, and here we have in today’s Gospel what happened the very next day, the calling of the first disciples. The other Gospels have Jesus walking by the lake of Galilee and calling them from where they sat by their fishing boats mending their nets, but John remembers it quite differently- for him the first encounter is by the river Jordan, where two disciples watch Jesus as he is walking by and are fascinated by him- encouraged by John the Baptist they start following Jesus, and Jesus turns round to see who they are.
What happens as John describes it is something that is deeply theological, something in other words that speaks to us of God and mankind’s relationship to him. And here we have the first words that Jesus speaks in the Gospel, “What do you want?” This is the question that Our Lord puts to everyone who shows any interest in him, in following him, in becoming a disciple of his- what is it that you are really looking for? What is it that you need? It is a question that touches on the basic need that is in every human being, a need to turn to God, to have some kind of intimacy and friendship with God that will put meaning and contentment into our lives. The answer of the two disciples is very interesting, they say “Where do you live?” or, in the better translation of the RSV, “Where are you staying?” The Greek word that John is using here –menein- does mean live, but it means stay, dwell, abide, words that have an idea of permanence about them. As humans, we live with the fact that nothing stays, nothing stays the same- “change and decay in all around I see” as the old hymn has it. One of the factors that is built into the human condition that cause us so much distress is that we live in a world of change, change and death, and we long to find something, someone, to grab hold of that will not change, that will stay the same no matter what. Alas, there is nothing, no one, that will not change- only God is the changeless one, never bored with us, never cross with us, never trading us in for a younger model, never abandoning us! An old hymn reminds us that “earthly friends may falter and change with changing years” – it is only Jesus who is the “friend who never faileth”, the one who is as St Claude la Colombière used to call “le seul, le véritable ami”, the one true friend. So the disciples are voicing this great yearning of all mankind, for something that is lasting, for a connexion of some kind to the eternal, for God. And Jesus responds to this desire with the invitation to join him in the place where he stays, in the permanence of his friendship- “so they went and saw where he lived”. And, such was the bond between them, so much was this the exact answer to their longings, that John says “they stayed with him”- they had come to stay in his friendship for ever. That is what our Lord has come to earth to offer mankind, the possibility of returning to an easy relationship with God, to enjoy his favour, to be at peace with him, and to stay in that peace.
The Gospel passage goes on to show us what is the natural, inevitable development that follows on from our entering into this new closeness with Our Lord. One of the two disciples we have been talking about is named here as Andrew, and the first thing he does is dash off to tell someone else about Jesus, who he is and what his message is- he goes to find his brother Simon Peter. That is part and parcel of being a disciple isn’t it- we become apostles too, people who go out to find others and bring them in to the circle and influence of our loving Saviour, so that they too can find in his friendship the peace and the permanence we crave in all the changes that swirl around us and bewilder us, mislead us and disappoint us. And notice what happens when we do evangelise, when we do our bit to explain the faith, to bring people to Our Lord. In explaining it, we enrich ourselves, in teaching- as any teacher knows- we deepen our own understanding. When Andrew first meets Jesus he just calls him “Rabbi”, just recognising that he is a great man, a great teacher, nothing more- at least, nothing he is sure of, even though he may have a few glimmerings of the glorious truth of who he really is. But by the time he is telling his brother about him, he is saying “We have found the Messiah”. So it is that as we try to explain our faith we find we grow in it and fresh and deeper insights come to us- I know I find this myself constantly on the RCIA programme.
And when Jesus meets Simon, as we all know, he gives him a new name- Cephas in Aramaic, or Peter in Greek. This is not a real name as such, it means Stone or Rock and so it is a nickname, like calling someone “Rocky”. We have had a lot in the press lately about nicknames. One of the stupidest sayings in the English language, I always think, is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Rubbish! We all know that cruel unkind words can do far more harm to us than anything else, and their wounding impact stays with us far longer than any bruise. And sometimes nicknames are nasty, aren’t they, a sly way of insulting us. But in their proper use, they can be a great sign of belonging, being part of the group, one of the family and so on. They can also be a deliberate attempt at forging a new identity- hence all the tags young people use on the street and the internet and so on. That is what is happening here- Jesus is giving Simon a nickname to show Simon is now a particularly close friend, an intimate, and of course also to indicate his new identity, his special function in the group, which Matthew has Jesus spell out- “the rock on which I shall build my Church”.
And so in this Gospel today we can see the evangelist telling us that Jesus has come to satisfy all those deepest spiritual needs of men and women, for something, someone that will not change, in other words, for God. He shows us Jesus inviting us into the place where he dwells, into the eternal, lasting friendship that is the life of God, letting us stay with him, calling us by terms of endearment and giving us a new identity. When shortly Fr Chris holds up the consecrated host and tells us “This is the lamb of God” he will be echoing John the Baptist’s words in this scene. May we respond as those first two disciples did, and come to communion to accept Our Lord’s invitation to come and dwell with him, as he comes to dwell with us, and may we stay in his friendship for ever. Amen.
Last week we had the story of the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, an event which marked the start of Jesus’s ministry, and here we have in today’s Gospel what happened the very next day, the calling of the first disciples. The other Gospels have Jesus walking by the lake of Galilee and calling them from where they sat by their fishing boats mending their nets, but John remembers it quite differently- for him the first encounter is by the river Jordan, where two disciples watch Jesus as he is walking by and are fascinated by him- encouraged by John the Baptist they start following Jesus, and Jesus turns round to see who they are.
What happens as John describes it is something that is deeply theological, something in other words that speaks to us of God and mankind’s relationship to him. And here we have the first words that Jesus speaks in the Gospel, “What do you want?” This is the question that Our Lord puts to everyone who shows any interest in him, in following him, in becoming a disciple of his- what is it that you are really looking for? What is it that you need? It is a question that touches on the basic need that is in every human being, a need to turn to God, to have some kind of intimacy and friendship with God that will put meaning and contentment into our lives. The answer of the two disciples is very interesting, they say “Where do you live?” or, in the better translation of the RSV, “Where are you staying?” The Greek word that John is using here –menein- does mean live, but it means stay, dwell, abide, words that have an idea of permanence about them. As humans, we live with the fact that nothing stays, nothing stays the same- “change and decay in all around I see” as the old hymn has it. One of the factors that is built into the human condition that cause us so much distress is that we live in a world of change, change and death, and we long to find something, someone, to grab hold of that will not change, that will stay the same no matter what. Alas, there is nothing, no one, that will not change- only God is the changeless one, never bored with us, never cross with us, never trading us in for a younger model, never abandoning us! An old hymn reminds us that “earthly friends may falter and change with changing years” – it is only Jesus who is the “friend who never faileth”, the one who is as St Claude la Colombière used to call “le seul, le véritable ami”, the one true friend. So the disciples are voicing this great yearning of all mankind, for something that is lasting, for a connexion of some kind to the eternal, for God. And Jesus responds to this desire with the invitation to join him in the place where he stays, in the permanence of his friendship- “so they went and saw where he lived”. And, such was the bond between them, so much was this the exact answer to their longings, that John says “they stayed with him”- they had come to stay in his friendship for ever. That is what our Lord has come to earth to offer mankind, the possibility of returning to an easy relationship with God, to enjoy his favour, to be at peace with him, and to stay in that peace.
The Gospel passage goes on to show us what is the natural, inevitable development that follows on from our entering into this new closeness with Our Lord. One of the two disciples we have been talking about is named here as Andrew, and the first thing he does is dash off to tell someone else about Jesus, who he is and what his message is- he goes to find his brother Simon Peter. That is part and parcel of being a disciple isn’t it- we become apostles too, people who go out to find others and bring them in to the circle and influence of our loving Saviour, so that they too can find in his friendship the peace and the permanence we crave in all the changes that swirl around us and bewilder us, mislead us and disappoint us. And notice what happens when we do evangelise, when we do our bit to explain the faith, to bring people to Our Lord. In explaining it, we enrich ourselves, in teaching- as any teacher knows- we deepen our own understanding. When Andrew first meets Jesus he just calls him “Rabbi”, just recognising that he is a great man, a great teacher, nothing more- at least, nothing he is sure of, even though he may have a few glimmerings of the glorious truth of who he really is. But by the time he is telling his brother about him, he is saying “We have found the Messiah”. So it is that as we try to explain our faith we find we grow in it and fresh and deeper insights come to us- I know I find this myself constantly on the RCIA programme.
And when Jesus meets Simon, as we all know, he gives him a new name- Cephas in Aramaic, or Peter in Greek. This is not a real name as such, it means Stone or Rock and so it is a nickname, like calling someone “Rocky”. We have had a lot in the press lately about nicknames. One of the stupidest sayings in the English language, I always think, is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Rubbish! We all know that cruel unkind words can do far more harm to us than anything else, and their wounding impact stays with us far longer than any bruise. And sometimes nicknames are nasty, aren’t they, a sly way of insulting us. But in their proper use, they can be a great sign of belonging, being part of the group, one of the family and so on. They can also be a deliberate attempt at forging a new identity- hence all the tags young people use on the street and the internet and so on. That is what is happening here- Jesus is giving Simon a nickname to show Simon is now a particularly close friend, an intimate, and of course also to indicate his new identity, his special function in the group, which Matthew has Jesus spell out- “the rock on which I shall build my Church”.
And so in this Gospel today we can see the evangelist telling us that Jesus has come to satisfy all those deepest spiritual needs of men and women, for something, someone that will not change, in other words, for God. He shows us Jesus inviting us into the place where he dwells, into the eternal, lasting friendship that is the life of God, letting us stay with him, calling us by terms of endearment and giving us a new identity. When shortly Fr Chris holds up the consecrated host and tells us “This is the lamb of God” he will be echoing John the Baptist’s words in this scene. May we respond as those first two disciples did, and come to communion to accept Our Lord’s invitation to come and dwell with him, as he comes to dwell with us, and may we stay in his friendship for ever. Amen.
New Year's Day 2009
| Homily for New Year’s Day: Mary the Mother of God 1 January 2009 The first impulse of the Church at the start of each new year is to confide ourselves afresh to the maternal care of Our Lady and to ask for her prayers to assist us as we make our first steps into the unknown- and not for many years has a new year seemed so unknown as this, when we face the colossal financial uncertainties in which the whole world is gripped. I try to read nowadays the business pages of the newspaper every day to see if I can understand what’s going on, but even the so-called experts who write the articles seem never to agree on how bad things are going to be or what it is going to feel like or how long this recession is going to last. And of course there is no shortage of religious people also wading in with their own predictions, their own take on these financial developments. Most of what they write annoys me I must say- I don’t like being told that being poor is going to be good for me! We will get our priorities right, they seem to suggest, once we are broke. Well, maybe….I find all that rather patronising, for who wants to be told that this is going to be good for you whether you like it or not? So now here I am this morning, yet another religious person, but not a patronising one I hope- and what is my take on all this? Well, I have no take actually. But one thing I do want to share with you, and that is a message that I have found this Christmas striking me with a new urgency in the familiar Gospel stories of the birth of Christ. You know of course that only two of the Gospels give us accounts of Jesus’s birth: Matthew and Luke. Let’s recall what Luke tells us first of all. Luke begins his Gospel not with the birth of Our Lord, but with the conception of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who will be his herald, the last of the prophets announcing the coming of the Messiah, the one whom our Orthodox brethren call simply “John the Forerunner.” Elizabeth, barren and past child-bearing age anyway, is suddenly pregnant, and the angel Gabriel comes to John’s father Zechariah to tell him this astounding news. When he sees the angel, standing by the altar just as he is about to perform his liturgical duties, he is of course frightened- Luke says “fear fell upon him”. But Luke goes on to say that the angel speaks to Zechariah and his opening words are “Do not be afraid!”- “Do not be afraid, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John, and you will have joy and gladness”. Do not be afraid- this is the refrain we hear no less than three times in the infancy narrative of Luke. You remember that this is what Gabriel also says to Our Lady when he greets her “Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” Mary too, like Zechariah, is bewildered by this sudden apparition, Luke tells us that “she was greatly troubled….and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. At once the angel says to her “Do not be afraid, for you have found favour with God”. And the third time we hear this saying is when an angel appears to those humble ordinary people, the shepherds, who were on duty that cold dark night, out in the fields watching their flock of sheep. They too were scared stiff- Luke says “they were filled with fear”. What does the old carol say? “Mighty dread had filled their troubled minds”. And what is the first thing the angel says to them? “Be not afraid” - “Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people”. And when we turn to Matthew’s Gospel we find the same thing. Where Luke has concentrated very much on Our Lady and showing us everything from Mary’s point of view, Matthew instead concentrates more on the person of Joseph. (One reason he does this is that he is anxious to show how Jesus fulfils all the criteria that the prophets had given through the centuries about the Messiah, and of course one thing they all agreed on was that the Messiah would come from the House of David, and Joseph was a descendant of David). Matthew begins his account by telling us that Joseph and Mary have got engaged, and that Joseph at first doesn’t know what to do when he finds out that Our Lady is pregnant. He thinks, doesn’t he, that maybe the best thing will be to divorce her privately. Matthew goes on to tell us “but as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream”. The angel explains that Mary is with child by the Holy Spirit- and he begins with the words “Joseph, son of David, do not fear”. “Do not fear to take Mary your wife”. And so you see no less than four times in the Christmas stories we hear the angels saying “Do not be afraid!” They are saying that to us too this Christmas if we will listen- at this holy season as my favourite carol says there are “angels bending near the earth to tune their harps of gold”. The carol goes on “But man at war with man hears not the love-song that they bring”. That is the risk we run when we are so consumed with all our worries about the future, that we do not listen! There are many people, many insistent voices, clamouring for our attention, especially now with news coming in every day of this or that bank collapsing, this or that firm laying off its workers, this or that politician promising all kinds of solutions and blaming everyone but themselves. We need to stay calm in all this maelstrom that is surging around us. We need to do two things, it seems to me. One is to use our brain, to use the brain that God has given us, to try to think as clearly as we can about what’s happening and how it will affect us personally. That is what Zechariah did: once he had heard Gabriel’s message he began thinking- “How shall I know this?” And it is what Our Lady did: she was thinking fast from the moment of the Archangel’s greeting when “she considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. Luke says “And Mary said to the angel, How shall this be, since I have no husband?” The other is to listen and take to heart the angels’ message to us- “Do not be afraid!” “Hush your noise” as the carol says “hear the love-song that they bring”. Let us advance into this year of grace 2009 in a spirit of confidence, inspired by the message that the angels bring us. Let us listen to the voice of God in our lives, those promptings of the Holy Spirit that will come to us in the quiet of our prayers and in our reflecting on the Word of God in the Scriptures; let us be like Mary in this, and “treasure all these things and ponder them” in our hearts, and then we may be like her in this too, that “we have found favour with God”. As we listen to the angels announcing to us the good news, of “peace to men who enjoy his favour” let us put aside our fears as the angels bid us, and may God “be gracious and bless us” as we walk into the unknown in the company of Our Lord and his Blessed Mother. Amen. |
Christmas Eve 2008
| Homily for Christmas Eve Vigil Mass 2008 As we processed it to church for this Mass, it was a joy to see so many dear and familiar faces, all smiling at the approach of this holy night, but chief among them I am pleased to see my old friend Solange, here in row A- she is nearly 89, and housebound, this is the first Christmas she has managed to get to Mass for many years but I dragged her here tonight. Soyez la bienvenue! Solange enchants me with her fund of stories about her childhood on a farm in the Vosges, in Lorraine, in Eastern France. I particularly enjoy her reminiscences about those village Christmases eighty or so years ago, when as midnight approached you could see from all the neighbouring farms each family set out for Mass, and come trudging along the paths at the edges of the fields, each with their own lantern swinging in the night, all those lights bobbing along, each one a family group muffled up against the cold, making their way to the village church while the bells pealed out in the frosty air. And there, in that ancient church as the Mass began, the choir- and Solange was in the village choir as a little girl- would belt out that charming old French Christmas hymn, “Minuit Chrétiens!” which we know in translation as “O Holy night”. It has a lot of theology in it, like all the old hymns do, and the second verse has a particularly striking line, I think: speaking of the birth of the Redeemer it asks “Qui lui dira notre reconnaissance?” Who will tell him our gratitude? How are we going to show our gratitude, how are we going to express to Our Lord how grateful we are that he came into our world, into our flesh, and dwelt among us? My Aunt, who brought me up, was big on manners- saying the right thing at the right time. But words, as I often found out, were never enough to satisfy her. If I had done something wrong, and said sorry, perhaps a bit too easily or a bit half-heartedly, she would say sceptically “Well, you don’t look sorry!” And so I learnt to act sorry! But that wasn’t enough either- to show I was sorry and meant it, I had to do something, to do something nice to the person I’d upset, to try to put right whatever it was I’d done wrong. And so it was with being grateful- just saying thank you was a start (I used to think as a boy that if I didn’t say thank you the ceiling would fall in, my Aunt’s eyes so often were raised to it!). Being grateful, like being sorry, had to mean more than just words, it had to involve action. And so it is with us tonight, when we consider how we are going to answer that question in the old hymn- how are we going to thank God for his precious gift, the gift of his only Son, the baby in the manger who has entered our world and taken on our humanity? Words are a start but we will want to do more than just words. An advert on TV has given me an answer- I wonder if you have seen it. It’s for the famous chemist’s that we have a branch of in the shopping centre here, and it takes place in an office where all the staff-mostly women- are taking part in a “Secret Santa”, and are secretly wrapping up the presents they have bought for the name they have drawn- a shaver for the man with the unruly beard, tweezers for the girl whose eyebrows meet in the middle, and so on. And there is one young woman who has a crush on the man whose name she has drawn, and she is busy wrapping herself up in a whole roll of Christmas paper and when the time comes for them all to go down to the tree and put their presents round it, there she is, try to hop her way down the stairs all done up as a present herself! She is the present, she is going to give herself, to some lucky man! Can that be us tonight? Can we make of our lives a present? If we stop and think about ourselves, and how we conduct our lives, and how we behave to those around us, are we a gift? Are we really much of a gift? Can we try to be a gift, a gift and a blessing, to our loved ones, to our neighbours and friends, to our work colleagues? We can ask Our Lord to help us become such a gift, so that we are better gifts, real presents to those among whom we live. At every Mass the priest takes the unconsecrated bread on the paten and says one of a variety of prayers: sometimes in Canon II he says “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy”- those words you know apply to us too- “that they may become for us the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ”. You see, we too must change with the changes that are wrought on the altar, we need to be made holy, we too need to be changed into the Body of Christ, to become more and more like Christ so that we can be his body in the world. In Canon III the priest says “May he make us an everlasting gift to you”. Our Lord is a gift to us, and we in our turn want to be a gift to him- this is the exchange of gifts that the old missal called “a wonderful commerce”, that God shares our humanity and we share his divinity, which is in the prayer that the deacon makes as he mixes the chalice to hand to the priest. Tonight we use the ancient Roman Canon, in which you will hear Fr Sean say “Bless and approve our offering, make it acceptable to you, an offering in spirit and in truth”. When we hear those words, let us place in our imagination ourselves and our lives on that paten next to the bread, so that it is of ourselves we are speaking- bless me, approve of me, make me acceptable to you, make my life an offering in spirit and in truth. Then our lives will be changed- if we allow ourselves to co-operate with the graces that come to us at this holy Mass tonight- and we will be able to be the gift to our family that we want to be, the blessing to those with whom we live and work. And so we answer that old carol’s question – who will tell him our gratitude? – we will! Dear Lord Jesus, let you spirit come upon us this Christmas night to make us holy, to make us acceptable to you, to make us an everlasting gift to you, as we bring to the manger the gift that is our very selves, an offering in spirit and in truth. Amen. |
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