Homily for Holy Family 26 December 2010
Dear Friends, I know this is the feast of the Holy Family, but I am not going to talk to you about the wonders of family life, I am sure you get tired of clergy talking to you about things of which they can only have a limited experience, and I have no desire to draw on my own family story for material, as it bores me let alone anyone else. No, I prefer to talk to you about something I do know about, and that is Scripture, and I know you share with me an enthusiasm for these sacred texts.
Last week we were looking at how Matthew, writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, uses the Old Testament again and again to get his message about Jesus across, sometimes using direct quotations and sometimes just dropping hints for us to pick up. We saw how he compared the birth of Our Lord to the start of a new age, of a new creation, and how the Spirit moved on the waters at the dawn of time in the Genesis account and how the same Spirit moved in Our Lady’s womb at the dawn of the new era of salvation that Jesus was bringing in. We looked at the parallels that Matthew was hoping we would draw between the work of the Spirit as shown in the Old Testament and the work of the Spirit in the coming of Christ at Christmas.
Today I want to reflect with you on what Matthew is saying about Jesus in this account we have just heard of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Now the mere mention of Egypt has us all thinking straightaway, doesn’t it, of that long period of slavery that the Israelites endured in Egypt, and how they were finally led out of Egypt to a new life in the Promised Land, how, under the guidance of Moses, they passed from slavery to liberation and formed a new people, bound together under the Covenant, the rules as it were of the game, the great contract between God and his chosen people. Well, that is of course exactly what Matthew wants us to think. He is comparing here Jesus and Moses. And there is a parallel we can see at once with this whole business of the child being in grave danger – you remember how when Moses was born, there was an order too, given by the Pharaoh, to kill the male children under a certain age, and how Moses managed to escape, in the famous basket in the bulrushes. Here another king, Herod, has given another fatwa, and Jesus manages to escape, this time by flight, flight to Egypt. The angel tells Joseph “Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt”. The very wording of that is interesting, because it doesn’t say “Take your son and your wife”, it says “the child and his mother”. I point this out because we can see in this careful use of words by the evangelist that he knows and wants to be sure we know that Joseph is not the natural father, that Mary was a virgin who conceived her son Our Lord by the Holy Spirit. And so Matthew has the Holy Family go to Egypt. This presents one huge problem for anyone who knows their Bible, because it is not only not mentioned by Luke, the other evangelist who gives us an account of the birth of Jesus (Mark and John don’t bother), but it is very hard to fit in with the way Luke describes events after the birth of Jesus, when they just go quietly back to Nazareth. We shall never know the exact truth of what really did happen, but we can know the truth, because each gospel writer is telling us the truth about Our Lord and using whatever seemed like the best way of getting it across to us. I am hesitant about dismissing this journey of the Holy Family to Egypt as a fabrication for two main reasons. One is, there was for at least two hundred years after the resurrection a persistent rumour that Jesus had lived in Egypt- this crops up a lot in Jewish writings, Jews trying to discredit Jesus would regularly say he was not the Messiah, he was only a magician, in other words his miracles were just tricks, and where did he learn his magic? he learnt it as a young man when he was a migrant worker in Egypt. So there seems to have been some kind of memory, even among his enemies, that Egypt came into the story somewhere. The other reason I have for believing it, is the constant tradition of the ancient Coptic Church, of the Christians of Egypt, evangelised from the outset by the apostle Mark and for the first centuries of the Church’s history a powerhouse of theology and sacred learning particularly at the School of Alexandria. You know I was in Cairo this year, and visited many of the Coptic churches there- one in five Egyptians is a Copt, and I can tell you that they are a faithful people, living for hundreds of years under every form of discrimination and still second class citizens in their own country. They have shed their blood for Christ in every generation and they deserve our respect. Anyway, they are extremely proud that Our Lord and his holy Mother lived in their country, and they can show you the spot where they rested on their journey, in what is now the crypt of a beautiful church, and they have a long tradition of icons and spirituality flowing from this sojourn of the holy Family in their exile. This hasn’t come from a myth.
Mary and Joseph stay in Egypt, as refugees, until it is safe for them to go back. And Matthew gets a quote in here, from the prophet Hosea (Hos 11 i): “I called my son out of Egypt”. The full quotation is “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”. Hosea thinks God is saying, when the Israelites were still a newish people, only a few generations of them, I loved them and I brought them out of Egypt. “My son” for Hosea means the whole people of Israel, they are all God’s sons, God’s children- just as we often call ourselves God’s children- but we know don’t we that there is a difference when we call ourselves sons and daughters of God and when we speak of Jesus as the Son of God. And here Matthew uses this quotation because it can have those two meanings- son with a small s and Son with a capital S. In the olden days God did bring his sons and daughters, the Children of Israel, out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised Land, and now, with Jesus, who is the Son of God so God can really say of him “my son”, (this is Matthew’s first hint of that title) God is bringing him out of Egypt, so that we who are joined to Christ by our Baptism and are part of his Body and sharers in his life, which means of course sharers in his experiences, we who are Christians, we too can be brought out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of the dependence on our bad habits and the whole slavery of sin and be liberated by him for life as a free man, a free woman, in charge of our own destiny and finally able to fulfil our true potential. Only we know what our own private Egypt is, what we are enslaved to, where life has led us and imprisoned us. But the good news is, God has brought his son out of Egypt, and if we are caught up in the life of that son by our Christian faith and our involvement in the sacramental life of the Church that keeps us close to him, then we too will be coming out of Egypt. And we need never go back there!
I suppose before we finish with this passage, we should think for a moment about how the Israelites came to be in Egypt in the first place. It was of course because of another Joseph, you remember how he was sold into slavery by his brothers and ended up working for the pharaoh, and how when there was a famine in Canaan he sent for his father Jacob and brought him and all his family to Egypt. In Genesis 46:4 God says to Jacob “I shall go down with you to Egypt and I shall bring you back again”. Jacob’s wife was Rachel, and later in the same chapter 2 of today’s Gospel when we come to the massacre of the Holy Innocents Matthew refers to Rachel, quoting what Jeremiah says “Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be consoled” (Mt 2 xviii). That’s another clue that we are on right track to be thinking about Jacob here too. Jacob of course died in Egypt, but he returned to the Promised Land in his descendants when Moses led them home years and years later. We too have our famine, there is hunger in our world, not just hunger for food in many parts of the world, real and scandalous though that is, but a deeper hunger, especially here in the West, a hunger for God, for the certainties of Faith, for some absolute truths in the shifting sands of the do-what-you-want and believe-what-you-like culture in which we live. Matthew is aware of this famine of the spirit, and he is trying to remind us here that God will find us in our famine and feed us, and that he will bring us back from the place where we experience famine and loss and emptiness of spirit to our own Promised Land, which we can reach by following where Our Lord has led, Our Lord, like another Moses, will lead us if we let him, from slavery to freedom, from our old ways, from the prison of self and self-centred life, to the new life that we can share with Christ.
And so in this passage this morning we can see many references in this flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, we can see some of the ideas that the evangelist wants to raise in the minds of his hearers, those who listen and know the scriptures as he did. Lord Jesus, bring us with you out of Egypt, out of the prison of our own personal Egypt, into the promised Land of freedom, deliver us- lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Dear God, call your sons and daughters out of Egypt! Amen.
Sunday 26 December 2010
Sunday 19 December 2010
Advent IV 2010
Homily for Advent IV 19 December 2010
These beautiful gospel readings that we have at Christmas time are probably the best known Biblical passages of all, and they are so familiar to us as we hear them again year after year that if we are not careful they pass over our heads like so much background music, like the carols playing in the shops that no one actually listens to – it is quite difficult for us to look at these texts and try to imagine how they would sound to us if we were hearing them for the first time.
Look at today’s Gospel, from Matthew. What we have in Matthew’s Gospel, all scholars would agree, is the very first attempt by someone in the Christian community to write down something about the birth of Our Lord, about how and why God the Son came into our world as a human being. Mark’s Gospel you know is a bit older, but Mark doesn’t mention anything at all about how Jesus was born, he just barges straight in with the adult Jesus getting baptised and beginning his ministry. But Matthew wants to tell us about the birth and infancy of Our Lord, and he says “this is how Jesus Christ came to be born”. And straightaway we have a mention of the Holy Spirit- Mary “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit”. And then a few lines later on, the angel tells Joseph that “she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit”. The evangelist is determined to tell us that right from the start there is the action of the Spirit, of the Spirit of God, in this new state of affairs that is the Incarnation. Now of course as you know Matthew was writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, of people who knew the scriptures- that is why he is constantly quoting verses of the Old Testament to prove his points. And here, with these references to the Holy Spirit, we can see what he is trying to remind his audience of – all the places in the Old Testament where the Spirit is involved, so that they can draw the parallels for themselves.
Let’s consider the main examples. First of all, we go to Genesis 1 and 2, the two creation stories. Here, at the very outset of creation, “when the earth was without form and void” we read (Gen 1 ii) that “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”. And as it was with the first creation, so it is with the new creation- at the very start, at the moment of the conception of Our Lord the Spirit of God was moving in Our Lady’s womb. Genesis 2 shows us God forming Adam like a potter moulding the clay, and we see that Adam comes alive when God breathes into his nostrils- a sign in itself of great intimacy- “the breath of life” (Gen 2vii). And you may remember that in Hebrew breath and spirit are the same word, ruach, and so this could just as easily be translated “God breathed into his nostrils the Spirit of life”. Again, you get the point: for the first human being formed God needed to give it his Spirit to give it life, and now, for this new human being, this Second Adam as St Paul likes to call Jesus, it is formed in the womb of Our Lady and given life there by God’s breath of life, the Spirit of Life. What is happening with Our Lord’s birth and entry into our world as a human being is the start of a new creation, of a new way of being human, and of a new way of us relating as humans to God. The breath of God is the creating force now as before, as one of the psalms reminds us: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their array” (Ps 33vi) In both creations, old and new, the Holy Spirit is at work!
This new creation inaugurated by the birth of Our Lord is desperately needed by our fallen confused world that has so utterly lost its way, that it is like the Israelites wandering round and round in the desert of Sinai when all the time the Promised Land was only a few hours’ drive away (well, you know what I mean). The desert is an arid place of death and decay, and that brings me to the next reference to the Spirit- I turn now to Ezekiel and his vision – you remember that valley, full of dry bones, and many of you will know the song too! (I won’t sing it, relax.) The valley is full of the bones, the dry bones, of many many dead men and the Spirit asks Ezekiel the question “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezek 37 iii) The story goes on: “Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live” (ix) and “the breath came into them and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host” (x.) Again, remember that for breath we can also put spirit- “come from the four winds, o Spirit, and breathe upon these…. that they may live”. Yes, humanity, dead in its awareness of God, can be brought back to life, and the people that Our Lord will call to be part of this new worldview, this new creation, will be indeed “an exceedingly great host”. And the action of the Spirit is how this will happen.
Just one more example, from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah also, like Ezekiel, talks of dry valleys, desperately in need of irrigation if they are ever to be fruitful. For him the Spirit of God is like some wonderful refreshing rain, that the parched earth will drink up and that will cause all sorts of seeds to germinate and spring up- you know how the desert can bloom. Isaiah hears God saying “I shall pour out water on the thirsty soil and streams on the dry land. I shall pour out my Spirit on your descendants, my blessing on your offspring, and they will spring up among the grass like willows on the banks of a stream” (Is 44 iii-iv) The world is thirsty for the good news of Jesus Christ and if only human beings will receive the message of salvation then God will pour out his Spirit upon them, irrigate their lives and then who knows what will start to grow, what green shoots will spring up, what will change, both for individuals and for society as a whole?
This is, I feel sure, the sort of train of thought that the evangelist wanted to start up in those first readers of his Gospel, of the passage we have heard today- these are the references he hoped we would be picking up. The birth of Our Lord is almost upon us, only a week to go. As we prepare to greet his birth, let us ask the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts as he did into Mary’s womb, and engender there a new person, a new me, a new improved me, a me that is truly and fully alive. Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe upon us that we may live. Amen.
These beautiful gospel readings that we have at Christmas time are probably the best known Biblical passages of all, and they are so familiar to us as we hear them again year after year that if we are not careful they pass over our heads like so much background music, like the carols playing in the shops that no one actually listens to – it is quite difficult for us to look at these texts and try to imagine how they would sound to us if we were hearing them for the first time.
Look at today’s Gospel, from Matthew. What we have in Matthew’s Gospel, all scholars would agree, is the very first attempt by someone in the Christian community to write down something about the birth of Our Lord, about how and why God the Son came into our world as a human being. Mark’s Gospel you know is a bit older, but Mark doesn’t mention anything at all about how Jesus was born, he just barges straight in with the adult Jesus getting baptised and beginning his ministry. But Matthew wants to tell us about the birth and infancy of Our Lord, and he says “this is how Jesus Christ came to be born”. And straightaway we have a mention of the Holy Spirit- Mary “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit”. And then a few lines later on, the angel tells Joseph that “she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit”. The evangelist is determined to tell us that right from the start there is the action of the Spirit, of the Spirit of God, in this new state of affairs that is the Incarnation. Now of course as you know Matthew was writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, of people who knew the scriptures- that is why he is constantly quoting verses of the Old Testament to prove his points. And here, with these references to the Holy Spirit, we can see what he is trying to remind his audience of – all the places in the Old Testament where the Spirit is involved, so that they can draw the parallels for themselves.
Let’s consider the main examples. First of all, we go to Genesis 1 and 2, the two creation stories. Here, at the very outset of creation, “when the earth was without form and void” we read (Gen 1 ii) that “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”. And as it was with the first creation, so it is with the new creation- at the very start, at the moment of the conception of Our Lord the Spirit of God was moving in Our Lady’s womb. Genesis 2 shows us God forming Adam like a potter moulding the clay, and we see that Adam comes alive when God breathes into his nostrils- a sign in itself of great intimacy- “the breath of life” (Gen 2vii). And you may remember that in Hebrew breath and spirit are the same word, ruach, and so this could just as easily be translated “God breathed into his nostrils the Spirit of life”. Again, you get the point: for the first human being formed God needed to give it his Spirit to give it life, and now, for this new human being, this Second Adam as St Paul likes to call Jesus, it is formed in the womb of Our Lady and given life there by God’s breath of life, the Spirit of Life. What is happening with Our Lord’s birth and entry into our world as a human being is the start of a new creation, of a new way of being human, and of a new way of us relating as humans to God. The breath of God is the creating force now as before, as one of the psalms reminds us: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their array” (Ps 33vi) In both creations, old and new, the Holy Spirit is at work!
This new creation inaugurated by the birth of Our Lord is desperately needed by our fallen confused world that has so utterly lost its way, that it is like the Israelites wandering round and round in the desert of Sinai when all the time the Promised Land was only a few hours’ drive away (well, you know what I mean). The desert is an arid place of death and decay, and that brings me to the next reference to the Spirit- I turn now to Ezekiel and his vision – you remember that valley, full of dry bones, and many of you will know the song too! (I won’t sing it, relax.) The valley is full of the bones, the dry bones, of many many dead men and the Spirit asks Ezekiel the question “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezek 37 iii) The story goes on: “Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live” (ix) and “the breath came into them and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host” (x.) Again, remember that for breath we can also put spirit- “come from the four winds, o Spirit, and breathe upon these…. that they may live”. Yes, humanity, dead in its awareness of God, can be brought back to life, and the people that Our Lord will call to be part of this new worldview, this new creation, will be indeed “an exceedingly great host”. And the action of the Spirit is how this will happen.
Just one more example, from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah also, like Ezekiel, talks of dry valleys, desperately in need of irrigation if they are ever to be fruitful. For him the Spirit of God is like some wonderful refreshing rain, that the parched earth will drink up and that will cause all sorts of seeds to germinate and spring up- you know how the desert can bloom. Isaiah hears God saying “I shall pour out water on the thirsty soil and streams on the dry land. I shall pour out my Spirit on your descendants, my blessing on your offspring, and they will spring up among the grass like willows on the banks of a stream” (Is 44 iii-iv) The world is thirsty for the good news of Jesus Christ and if only human beings will receive the message of salvation then God will pour out his Spirit upon them, irrigate their lives and then who knows what will start to grow, what green shoots will spring up, what will change, both for individuals and for society as a whole?
This is, I feel sure, the sort of train of thought that the evangelist wanted to start up in those first readers of his Gospel, of the passage we have heard today- these are the references he hoped we would be picking up. The birth of Our Lord is almost upon us, only a week to go. As we prepare to greet his birth, let us ask the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts as he did into Mary’s womb, and engender there a new person, a new me, a new improved me, a me that is truly and fully alive. Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe upon us that we may live. Amen.
Saturday 16 October 2010
29th Sunday of the Year 17 October 2010
Homily for 29th Sunday in ordinary time 17 October 2010
We continue our journey through St Luke’s Gospel with another one of his rather strange parables, you remember the really confusing one two weeks ago about the so-called dishonest steward, this time we have a story about a dishonest judge. And this unjust judge is compared to God himself! It has to be said that some of Luke’s stories are not that straightforward! Some, like last week’s story about the ten lepers, all cured but only one saying thank you, are easy enough for us to understand, but others have awkward bits that are hard to explain.
This story seems to be about a widow trying to get justice. We know that one of the main characteristics of Luke’s Gospel is its preoccupation with the poor, the needy, the outcasts of society, those who don’t fit in. St Luke emphasises again and again in his Gospel that these are just the people Our Lord has come into the world to save, and he shows Our Lord constantly finding ways to demonstrate the value that such people have- that is why Our Lord mixes with them, he is mixing with the outcasts, the out crowd, to show us and them that they are in fact very much the in crowd and even if they don’t seem to fit in very well to society, or our view of it, they fit or should fit perfectly into his view of society, in other words, the Church. This is why we have a widow in this parable. Widows were at best an awkward presence in Jewish society, often scorned by their late husband’s family and often condemned to live on charity. All through the Old Testament we find examples of widows to whom justice is denied, who are disgraced just by being a widow and who have no rights, no chance. The first Christians were always anxious to reverse this, hence all the injunctions in the New Testament about looking after widows and orphans. So the widow is there as an example of someone at a disadvantage in the world, someone with no privileges and no support. And of course she is there in the story as an example of constancy in prayer, an example for all Christians, to be constant in prayer. Of course, if you’re in trouble and life is hard, you are more likely to be saying your prayers every day, aren’t you- when our life is beset with problems, we feel our need for God and his loving help all the more keenly. We know, when our troubles fall thick and fast upon us, that we can’t manage alone, and we call then upon God all the more urgently, to get us through. How different when everything is a bed of roses and we are coasting merrily along- then, like last week’s lepers, very few of us keep the prayers going!
And then there is this wretched judge, who can’t be bothered to help her at first but then gives in because he just knows she’s going to go on nag nag nag until she drives him up the wall. Does this remind you of another parable of Luke’s? Do you remember the man whose friend arrives at midnight and he goes and knocks on the neighbours’ door to borrow some food? It comes in Chapter 11, straight after the version of the Lord’s Prayer that Luke gives us, and Jesus comments on the neighbour in the story “though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs” (Lk 11 viii). Another lesson to drive home the importance of being constant in prayer! But back to this unjust judge! The idea of God as Judge is of course found right across the Old Testament but I wonder if this parable is a conscious echo of a passage in the book of Sirach – a writer as close to Jesus’s own time as Newman is to us. I refer to chapter 35; listen to how it fits in: “the Lord is the judge, and with him is no partiality. He will not show partiality in the case of a poor man and he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against him who has caused them to fall?” (Sir 35 xii-xv).
But I think the best way to understand this story is to look at its context in Luke’s Gospel, to see where it stands. After last week’s story of the ungrateful lepers, chapter 17 goes on at great length about the end of the world, how unexpected the Return of Our Lord will be and how it will be a time of suffering and of decision - Luke has Jesus comparing these end times to the days of Noah and of Lot, and insisting that there must be no turning back, no dithering – “let him who is on then housetop with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back” (Lk 17 xxxi) That is the light in which we must read today’s Gospel about this corrupt judge and this nagging woman; we are in the end times, the world will come to its end one day we know not when or how, but we must live with that sense of urgency that goes with being on red alert- we should be keeping our prayers going, making sure we frequent the sacraments, getting our priorities right, deciding once and for all what matters and what doesn’t matter in our lives, and above all keeping our confidence up that God will look after us. As Our Lord says in this text “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them!” Of course that is why this story ends with Jesus asking the question about faith- when all this happens, when Our Lord, the Son of Man as he likes to call himself, comes to find us, what will he find? “Will he find any faith on earth?” Let us assure Our Lord this evening that when he comes to Lewisham tonight, when he arrives on our altar when the words of consecration turn bread and wine into his very Body and Blood, when he is here among us and we come close to his Presence at communion, let us assure him that he will find faith on earth, that we are among those who will never lose heart, who will cry to him in prayer day and night, who want to be his chosen, the chosen for whom God will see justice done. Amen
We continue our journey through St Luke’s Gospel with another one of his rather strange parables, you remember the really confusing one two weeks ago about the so-called dishonest steward, this time we have a story about a dishonest judge. And this unjust judge is compared to God himself! It has to be said that some of Luke’s stories are not that straightforward! Some, like last week’s story about the ten lepers, all cured but only one saying thank you, are easy enough for us to understand, but others have awkward bits that are hard to explain.
This story seems to be about a widow trying to get justice. We know that one of the main characteristics of Luke’s Gospel is its preoccupation with the poor, the needy, the outcasts of society, those who don’t fit in. St Luke emphasises again and again in his Gospel that these are just the people Our Lord has come into the world to save, and he shows Our Lord constantly finding ways to demonstrate the value that such people have- that is why Our Lord mixes with them, he is mixing with the outcasts, the out crowd, to show us and them that they are in fact very much the in crowd and even if they don’t seem to fit in very well to society, or our view of it, they fit or should fit perfectly into his view of society, in other words, the Church. This is why we have a widow in this parable. Widows were at best an awkward presence in Jewish society, often scorned by their late husband’s family and often condemned to live on charity. All through the Old Testament we find examples of widows to whom justice is denied, who are disgraced just by being a widow and who have no rights, no chance. The first Christians were always anxious to reverse this, hence all the injunctions in the New Testament about looking after widows and orphans. So the widow is there as an example of someone at a disadvantage in the world, someone with no privileges and no support. And of course she is there in the story as an example of constancy in prayer, an example for all Christians, to be constant in prayer. Of course, if you’re in trouble and life is hard, you are more likely to be saying your prayers every day, aren’t you- when our life is beset with problems, we feel our need for God and his loving help all the more keenly. We know, when our troubles fall thick and fast upon us, that we can’t manage alone, and we call then upon God all the more urgently, to get us through. How different when everything is a bed of roses and we are coasting merrily along- then, like last week’s lepers, very few of us keep the prayers going!
And then there is this wretched judge, who can’t be bothered to help her at first but then gives in because he just knows she’s going to go on nag nag nag until she drives him up the wall. Does this remind you of another parable of Luke’s? Do you remember the man whose friend arrives at midnight and he goes and knocks on the neighbours’ door to borrow some food? It comes in Chapter 11, straight after the version of the Lord’s Prayer that Luke gives us, and Jesus comments on the neighbour in the story “though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs” (Lk 11 viii). Another lesson to drive home the importance of being constant in prayer! But back to this unjust judge! The idea of God as Judge is of course found right across the Old Testament but I wonder if this parable is a conscious echo of a passage in the book of Sirach – a writer as close to Jesus’s own time as Newman is to us. I refer to chapter 35; listen to how it fits in: “the Lord is the judge, and with him is no partiality. He will not show partiality in the case of a poor man and he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against him who has caused them to fall?” (Sir 35 xii-xv).
But I think the best way to understand this story is to look at its context in Luke’s Gospel, to see where it stands. After last week’s story of the ungrateful lepers, chapter 17 goes on at great length about the end of the world, how unexpected the Return of Our Lord will be and how it will be a time of suffering and of decision - Luke has Jesus comparing these end times to the days of Noah and of Lot, and insisting that there must be no turning back, no dithering – “let him who is on then housetop with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back” (Lk 17 xxxi) That is the light in which we must read today’s Gospel about this corrupt judge and this nagging woman; we are in the end times, the world will come to its end one day we know not when or how, but we must live with that sense of urgency that goes with being on red alert- we should be keeping our prayers going, making sure we frequent the sacraments, getting our priorities right, deciding once and for all what matters and what doesn’t matter in our lives, and above all keeping our confidence up that God will look after us. As Our Lord says in this text “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them!” Of course that is why this story ends with Jesus asking the question about faith- when all this happens, when Our Lord, the Son of Man as he likes to call himself, comes to find us, what will he find? “Will he find any faith on earth?” Let us assure Our Lord this evening that when he comes to Lewisham tonight, when he arrives on our altar when the words of consecration turn bread and wine into his very Body and Blood, when he is here among us and we come close to his Presence at communion, let us assure him that he will find faith on earth, that we are among those who will never lose heart, who will cry to him in prayer day and night, who want to be his chosen, the chosen for whom God will see justice done. Amen
October Devotions
Homily for October Devotions Sunday 3 October 2010
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
Sunday 19 September 2010
sunday 19 september 2010
Homily for 25th Sunday in ordinary time year C 19 September 2010
Today’s Gospel is really such a strange story, I wonder if you found it rather confusing, rather odd – is it really recommending a bit of imaginative accounting, a bit of sharp practice, a bit of dishonesty, a bit of cheating, as the way to get on? And not just the way to get on, but also the way to win the approval of the master, who is presumably the Lord himself?
In the first centuries of the Church this parable, unique to Luke’s Gospel, except for the last verse 13, bewildered people too. In the early 5th century St Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, calls this story “a very difficult parable” and laments that “none of our treatises seem….to offer an adequate explanation”. And his contemporary St Augustine, after agonising over how it could be that Our Lord praises someone “who has acted deceitfully”, anxiously tells his congregation that although Our Lord commended the steward for making provision for the future, “nevertheless we are not to imitate him in all that he did”.
At first glance it does seem to be saying cheating can be quite a good idea, being smart, maybe a bit too smart, with money, and perhaps it doesn’t seem so jarring if we remember the same sort of worldly advice in the Old Testament, in those collections of good advice and reflection on the ways of the world that we call wisdom literature - the book of Proverbs comes to mind. And not only in the Old Testament, but the in New also – is this the kind of cleverness we can do with when we’re up against the hostile world? All this stuff about astuteness- “the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Lk 16 viii) Our Lord seems to be suggesting this in that famous verse in Matthew’s Gospel when he says “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10 xvi).
Actually I don’t think that is what this particular parable is about at all. It is certainly partly about money, that’s for sure, because it ends with the dictum we all know so well: “You cannot serve God and mammon” or as the translation we use at Mass has it: “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money” (Lk 16 xiii). This story comes at the start of a section of three chapters where the evangelist collects together several stories on the theme of riches, and the dangers they often provoke- money, and the trouble with it! Nothing wrong with money, especially if we’ve earnt it, and we all know what a difference it can make to have enough money to go round, or even, joy of joys, to have a bit left over at the end of the month to put away! But it’s when we start to think that money can solve everything, fill every gap, plug every hole in our lives, that’s the danger- or when we have so much of this world’s possessions that we feel completely cushioned from anything that could possibly go wrong- because then we can easily begin to forget God, and to forget that things in our life are actually in his control and not in ours! And being too fond of all the things we have accumulated around us thanks to our money, that can really hold us back too – later in chapter 18 we will have the rich young man who just can’t bring himself to part with anything, and so has to refuse Our Lord’s call. (Lk 18 xviii- xxx)
But there is more to this parable than money. What I really want to reflect with you about is this whole business of the changing of the amounts that the debtors owed. Now in Palestine in the time of Our Lord, there were many absentee landlords, rich people who owned estates, farms and so on, which they almost never visited; they would leave everything to do with their estate in the hands of an oikonomos, that is an agent, a manager or as the gospel calls him, a steward. These were not just servants but professional men- accountants really- who enjoyed considerable independence and could more or less do what they liked with their employers’ funds. They often lent out their employers’ property, land etc, for perhaps a number of years, and always of course with a commission built in for themselves, or with interest on the loan. Now the normal way of doing this all over the Mediterranean world at this time was to write out a bond and just mention the final total you owed, not splitting it up into the amount borrowed and the interest. So, what we have here in this parable is the steward deciding to rewrite the bonds of the people who are in debt to his master, rewriting them and subtracting his commission, the interest he was charging them for his own profit as the middleman. This is what lies behind this business of crossing out a hundred barrels of oil and writing fifty, or a hundred measures of wheat and writing eighty. The steward who has done all these transactions, not dishonest but just normal practice, is making sure that what he has done for others has not brought him any advantage himself. We are to do good, not for what we can get out of it, not for any tangible rewards here and now, but for an eternal reward, when as the Master in the parable says we will be welcomed “into the tents of eternity”. That is, I suggest, what Our Lord is trying to say to us in this parable: if we think of our own advantage all the time in whatever we’re doing, in our good deeds, in our attempts at the good life, if we keep thinking to ourselves “Yes, lovely, but what’s in it for me?” “Where’s the pay off?” “What am I getting out of all this being a good Catholic?” then we have got something terribly wrong. Our Christian life must not become a calculation- but one long act of love, one long demonstration of our love for God- and of course we know that real love is never calculating, it is just giving and forgiving. You remember that lovely prayer of St Ignatius: “to give and not to count the cost, to labour and not to look for any reward, save that of knowing that we do thy will….” Only then, when we have written ourselves and our own interest out of our good deeds, will we “win friends”, as the gospel has it, and they will be the friends that really matter- Our Lord and his Holy Mother- and we can be sure that they “will welcome (us) into the tents of eternity”. O Jesus, when we must leave this life and give an account of our stewardship of ourselves, help us to have lived our lives in such a way that we will find in you and your holy Mother and all the saints “some who will welcome (us) into their homes”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is really such a strange story, I wonder if you found it rather confusing, rather odd – is it really recommending a bit of imaginative accounting, a bit of sharp practice, a bit of dishonesty, a bit of cheating, as the way to get on? And not just the way to get on, but also the way to win the approval of the master, who is presumably the Lord himself?
In the first centuries of the Church this parable, unique to Luke’s Gospel, except for the last verse 13, bewildered people too. In the early 5th century St Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, calls this story “a very difficult parable” and laments that “none of our treatises seem….to offer an adequate explanation”. And his contemporary St Augustine, after agonising over how it could be that Our Lord praises someone “who has acted deceitfully”, anxiously tells his congregation that although Our Lord commended the steward for making provision for the future, “nevertheless we are not to imitate him in all that he did”.
At first glance it does seem to be saying cheating can be quite a good idea, being smart, maybe a bit too smart, with money, and perhaps it doesn’t seem so jarring if we remember the same sort of worldly advice in the Old Testament, in those collections of good advice and reflection on the ways of the world that we call wisdom literature - the book of Proverbs comes to mind. And not only in the Old Testament, but the in New also – is this the kind of cleverness we can do with when we’re up against the hostile world? All this stuff about astuteness- “the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Lk 16 viii) Our Lord seems to be suggesting this in that famous verse in Matthew’s Gospel when he says “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10 xvi).
Actually I don’t think that is what this particular parable is about at all. It is certainly partly about money, that’s for sure, because it ends with the dictum we all know so well: “You cannot serve God and mammon” or as the translation we use at Mass has it: “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money” (Lk 16 xiii). This story comes at the start of a section of three chapters where the evangelist collects together several stories on the theme of riches, and the dangers they often provoke- money, and the trouble with it! Nothing wrong with money, especially if we’ve earnt it, and we all know what a difference it can make to have enough money to go round, or even, joy of joys, to have a bit left over at the end of the month to put away! But it’s when we start to think that money can solve everything, fill every gap, plug every hole in our lives, that’s the danger- or when we have so much of this world’s possessions that we feel completely cushioned from anything that could possibly go wrong- because then we can easily begin to forget God, and to forget that things in our life are actually in his control and not in ours! And being too fond of all the things we have accumulated around us thanks to our money, that can really hold us back too – later in chapter 18 we will have the rich young man who just can’t bring himself to part with anything, and so has to refuse Our Lord’s call. (Lk 18 xviii- xxx)
But there is more to this parable than money. What I really want to reflect with you about is this whole business of the changing of the amounts that the debtors owed. Now in Palestine in the time of Our Lord, there were many absentee landlords, rich people who owned estates, farms and so on, which they almost never visited; they would leave everything to do with their estate in the hands of an oikonomos, that is an agent, a manager or as the gospel calls him, a steward. These were not just servants but professional men- accountants really- who enjoyed considerable independence and could more or less do what they liked with their employers’ funds. They often lent out their employers’ property, land etc, for perhaps a number of years, and always of course with a commission built in for themselves, or with interest on the loan. Now the normal way of doing this all over the Mediterranean world at this time was to write out a bond and just mention the final total you owed, not splitting it up into the amount borrowed and the interest. So, what we have here in this parable is the steward deciding to rewrite the bonds of the people who are in debt to his master, rewriting them and subtracting his commission, the interest he was charging them for his own profit as the middleman. This is what lies behind this business of crossing out a hundred barrels of oil and writing fifty, or a hundred measures of wheat and writing eighty. The steward who has done all these transactions, not dishonest but just normal practice, is making sure that what he has done for others has not brought him any advantage himself. We are to do good, not for what we can get out of it, not for any tangible rewards here and now, but for an eternal reward, when as the Master in the parable says we will be welcomed “into the tents of eternity”. That is, I suggest, what Our Lord is trying to say to us in this parable: if we think of our own advantage all the time in whatever we’re doing, in our good deeds, in our attempts at the good life, if we keep thinking to ourselves “Yes, lovely, but what’s in it for me?” “Where’s the pay off?” “What am I getting out of all this being a good Catholic?” then we have got something terribly wrong. Our Christian life must not become a calculation- but one long act of love, one long demonstration of our love for God- and of course we know that real love is never calculating, it is just giving and forgiving. You remember that lovely prayer of St Ignatius: “to give and not to count the cost, to labour and not to look for any reward, save that of knowing that we do thy will….” Only then, when we have written ourselves and our own interest out of our good deeds, will we “win friends”, as the gospel has it, and they will be the friends that really matter- Our Lord and his Holy Mother- and we can be sure that they “will welcome (us) into the tents of eternity”. O Jesus, when we must leave this life and give an account of our stewardship of ourselves, help us to have lived our lives in such a way that we will find in you and your holy Mother and all the saints “some who will welcome (us) into their homes”. Amen.
Friday 13 August 2010
nineteenth sunday in ordinary time 8 august 2010
How often in the Gospels we hear Our Lord speaking urgently to his disciples of the need for vigilance, for being always on the alert, for not getting too lax, too complacent about our relationship with God. Here Jesus tells them “See that you are dressed for action and have your lamps lit!” The mention of lamps makes us think straightaway doesn’t it of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins of the famous parable, the wise virgins who had brought enough oil with them to keep their lamps lit for when the bridegroom would arrive. It is in Matthew chapter 25 and when finally the bridegroom comes we read that “those who were ready went with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut” (Mt 25 x) and the moral is “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour”, a phrase we find repeated in Matthew and also in Mark. There is a sense in all these stories that we must not drop our guard, that we are like sentries in a war, we have to keep scanning the horizon to see if the enemy is trying to approach. In the First Letter of St Peter we hear the good advice of the apostle: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” (I Pet 5 viii) We think too of course of Our Lord’s request to his disciples when his troubles came upon him and he needed to feel their loyalty- you remember, on the Mt of Olives Jesus saying “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me” (Mt 26 xxxviii) and alas, such is our frail human nature, none of them could stay awake!
What is this watchfulness that Our Lord wants from us? Well, it is partly to show him we care, we care enough about him to stay awake, to stay alert, not to doze off, lulled by the lullaby of the world and all its delights. But it is not just for the enemy that we have to be watching earnestly, it is for the One we love. When we are in love with someone, we are so excited to be in their company that we are wide-awake, we don’t want to miss anything, not a nanosecond of their company: that great love song in the Bible, the Song of Songs, has the lover saying “I slept but my heart was awake. Hark! My Beloved is knocking!” (Cant 5 ii) We should be as eager for Our Lord as that, as ready to wonder if we are hearing his footstep, or recognising the sound of his voice, as we do when we are besotted with someone. Because if we are listening as earnestly as that, then we will hear his voice- he will be speaking to us in all sorts of ways using all sorts of people and anything from the “Metro” to the Bible– things will leap off the page at us, filled suddenly with meaning because we are thinking of him. This watchfulness will show itself also in our fondness for prayer, our determination to keep the lines of communication with the Beloved open at all times- how many times do people text their boyfriend or their girlfriend? Maybe you are doing it even now in some corner of a pew! A bit further on in Luke’s Gospel Luke has Jesus tell us “But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength…” (Lk 21 xxxvi) and St Paul tells the Ephesians “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6 xviii) and ends his First Letter to the Corinthians with the advice “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong” (I Cor 16 xiii).
And so in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying “ You too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an Hour you do not expect”. We have seen that one way of imagining this attitude is to think of the lover waiting for the loved one, but here we have another image: the servants who are waiting up to be ready to greet the Master of the household whenever he returns, however late it may be, however inconvenient it may be. Jesus says we are to be “ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks”. Here we have another aspect of this watchfulness: we are to be on the look-out for the least thing that our Master might want, to be there to hand whatever it is to him, to look after him, to be as it were thinking ahead to help him – the perfect servant, the servant he will love to have by his side, whom he can’t do without, whom he relies on, with whom there is an unbreakable bond of trust.
What we are seeing in fact is a description of the Christian life as we should aim to live it- vigilant and faithful is what we are supposed to be, what Our Lord wants from us above all. An attitude that is all about how we can serve Our Lord and how we can show him our love in our service, how we can grow in our love in our faithfulness to prayer and how, by keeping our hearts always fixed on him, we can discern his traces, his footsteps and the sound of his voice, in a thousand things that happen to us in the course of a week, how we can keep our distance from the snares of evil, how we can stay on guard over our frail human nature so that we do not in a moment of foolishness fall so half asleep with our fantasies that we sell the pass. Those first disciples were a hopeless lot, weren’t they- do you remember on the Mt of Olives Mark tells us Jesus , who so wanted them to stay awake, found them all sleeping “and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?”” (Mk 14 xxxvii) We ask this morning for the grace to stay awake, on the alert and on guard. Help us to stand ready for Our Lord in every aspect of our lives. O Jesus, when you come, find us watching, find us with our lamps lit, find us ready to jump up and let you in- and then, like the Master in today’s Gospel, dear Jesus sit us down at your table and wait on us, take us to the marriage feast, give us the Bread of Heaven from the Table of the King of Kings. Amen.
What is this watchfulness that Our Lord wants from us? Well, it is partly to show him we care, we care enough about him to stay awake, to stay alert, not to doze off, lulled by the lullaby of the world and all its delights. But it is not just for the enemy that we have to be watching earnestly, it is for the One we love. When we are in love with someone, we are so excited to be in their company that we are wide-awake, we don’t want to miss anything, not a nanosecond of their company: that great love song in the Bible, the Song of Songs, has the lover saying “I slept but my heart was awake. Hark! My Beloved is knocking!” (Cant 5 ii) We should be as eager for Our Lord as that, as ready to wonder if we are hearing his footstep, or recognising the sound of his voice, as we do when we are besotted with someone. Because if we are listening as earnestly as that, then we will hear his voice- he will be speaking to us in all sorts of ways using all sorts of people and anything from the “Metro” to the Bible– things will leap off the page at us, filled suddenly with meaning because we are thinking of him. This watchfulness will show itself also in our fondness for prayer, our determination to keep the lines of communication with the Beloved open at all times- how many times do people text their boyfriend or their girlfriend? Maybe you are doing it even now in some corner of a pew! A bit further on in Luke’s Gospel Luke has Jesus tell us “But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength…” (Lk 21 xxxvi) and St Paul tells the Ephesians “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6 xviii) and ends his First Letter to the Corinthians with the advice “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong” (I Cor 16 xiii).
And so in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying “ You too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an Hour you do not expect”. We have seen that one way of imagining this attitude is to think of the lover waiting for the loved one, but here we have another image: the servants who are waiting up to be ready to greet the Master of the household whenever he returns, however late it may be, however inconvenient it may be. Jesus says we are to be “ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks”. Here we have another aspect of this watchfulness: we are to be on the look-out for the least thing that our Master might want, to be there to hand whatever it is to him, to look after him, to be as it were thinking ahead to help him – the perfect servant, the servant he will love to have by his side, whom he can’t do without, whom he relies on, with whom there is an unbreakable bond of trust.
What we are seeing in fact is a description of the Christian life as we should aim to live it- vigilant and faithful is what we are supposed to be, what Our Lord wants from us above all. An attitude that is all about how we can serve Our Lord and how we can show him our love in our service, how we can grow in our love in our faithfulness to prayer and how, by keeping our hearts always fixed on him, we can discern his traces, his footsteps and the sound of his voice, in a thousand things that happen to us in the course of a week, how we can keep our distance from the snares of evil, how we can stay on guard over our frail human nature so that we do not in a moment of foolishness fall so half asleep with our fantasies that we sell the pass. Those first disciples were a hopeless lot, weren’t they- do you remember on the Mt of Olives Mark tells us Jesus , who so wanted them to stay awake, found them all sleeping “and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?”” (Mk 14 xxxvii) We ask this morning for the grace to stay awake, on the alert and on guard. Help us to stand ready for Our Lord in every aspect of our lives. O Jesus, when you come, find us watching, find us with our lamps lit, find us ready to jump up and let you in- and then, like the Master in today’s Gospel, dear Jesus sit us down at your table and wait on us, take us to the marriage feast, give us the Bread of Heaven from the Table of the King of Kings. Amen.
Sunday 25 July 2010
Sunday 25 July 2010
Homily for 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 25 July 2010
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
Sunday 18 July 2010
Sunday 18 July 2010
Homily for Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C 18 July 2010
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
Sunday 13 June 2010
13 June 2010
Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 13 June 2010
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
Saturday 29 May 2010
Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Homily for Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Pentecost 2010
Homily for Pentecost 23 May 2010 (Yr c)
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Sunday 9 May 2010
Sixth Sunday of Easter 2010
Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter 9 May 2010
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
Thursday 8 April 2010
Palm Sunday 2010
Homily for Palm Sunday 28 March 2010
Today we commemorate in our Liturgy the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when he arrives in a sort of pageant that his disciples arrange for him, so that he enters the city that is to be the scene of his final struggle with the powers of evil and death in a triumphal procession. Now the evangelists as we know wrote their Gospels very carefully and wanted us to pick up from the way they described things all sorts of allusions and echoes from the Old Testament that would help us to give greater meaning to what they are relating for us. This morning I want to reflect with you on one of these echoes, which is the entry of Simon Macchabaeus into Jerusalem when this great military leader of the Jews had managed to regain control of Jerusalem after it had been in the hands of the Syrians and after the Temple had been desecrated and abandoned.
This is all recounted for us in the two books of Macchabees, very late additions to the Old Testament which were written only about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. We read that Simon expelled all the enemies from the Holy City and “cleansed the citadel from its pollutions” (I Macc 13:50) and then it says “the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches….and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel”. It seems impossible that the disciples did not have this passage in mind when they arranged for Jesus to come into Jerusalem with the crowds of his followers waving their palms – especially as the original event, the arrival of Simon Maccabaeus in triumph, was only 150 or so years before. Here, the evangelists seem to be saying, is another great leader, coming to put things right, coming to the Holy City, coming to the Temple to cleanse it, but coming unlike Simon fresh from his triumphs but in Jesus’s case ready to face his enemies and conquer them. It is interesting to see how, in Matthew Mark and Luke, the arrival of Jesus in this way, with the crowds singing hymns and waving palms, is immediately followed by the cleansing of the Temple: Mark says he went straight to the Temple “looked around at everything” but put off the cleansing of it until the next day “as it was already late” (Mk 11:11) but Matthew and Luke say he did it straightaway “And Jesus entered the Temple of God” says Matthew “and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple” (Mt 21:12) while Luke says “and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold” (Lk 19:45). The victor arrives in the Holy City which has been in the hands of the enemy and he cleanses it and makes it holy again.
Twenty years before this, in 165 BC, Simon’s brother Judas Macchabaeus had also managed to retake Jerusalem, although not permanently. The Jews were horrified when they recaptured the city and saw the state the Temple was in – there was an altar to the Greek God Zeus where the Holy of Holies had been and in chapter 4 of I Macchabees we read “they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket….”(I Macc 4:38) And now it was that a miracle occurred, for when they tried to relight the sanctuary lamp that should always burn in the Temple, there was only enough oil to last one day, but in fact it lasted eight days – time enough for them to press some fresh olives and produce a new supply of the olive oil that they burned. Because of this, the Jews declared a new feast, the feast of the rededication of the Temple, to be held every year. This is the feast that Jewish people still keep today, it falls in December around Christmas time and it is called Channukah, and it lasts for eight days. Sometimes it is also called the Feast of Lights, because the way Jewish people celebrate it is to have a special eight-branched candlestick in their homes which they light more lights one every evening that the feast lasts. The rabbis say that these lights are not “for the house within” but should be put in the doorway or on the windowsill because they are “of the house without” – they are meant to give light to the outside, not the inside. And this aspect of the entry into Jerusalem, of the making holy again, of the miraculous light which God gave to make the rededication of the Temple possible, the whole festival of Lights that the Jews held to remind themselves of these events, has its echo I think in John’s Gospel. John as you know records things always a bit differently from the other three evangelists and he has already used the story of the cleansing of the Temple by the angry Jesus much earlier on in his Gospel. But in John, showing I think that he too is thinking of these same events in recent Jewish history, soon after his entry into Jerusalem Jesus starts talking about Light. John tells us that “Jesus said to them “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light….while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light”.” (Jn 12:35-6).
Today we celebrate this solemn entry of Our Lord the victor, the cleanser, into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him to into our lives, let us ask him to make his solemn entry today into our hearts: let us ask him to expel from our hearts the enemies that lurk there – our selfishness and what our dear Holy Father calls “our mysterious complicity with sin” – let us allow him to cleanse the sanctuary of our hearts and rededicate it to God’s service. Heaven knows, the sanctuary of my heart is a bit overgrown, I have a few brambles and weeds growing there and maybe yours is in the same sad and neglected state. Now is the hour for the great cleansing of our hearts. Dear Jesus, as we rededicate ourselves to you today, give us that miraculous light that will shine into every corner of our lives to purify us, you are the Light of the World, help us to believe in the Light that we may become sons and daughters of light. Hosanna, come and save us! Amen.
Today we commemorate in our Liturgy the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when he arrives in a sort of pageant that his disciples arrange for him, so that he enters the city that is to be the scene of his final struggle with the powers of evil and death in a triumphal procession. Now the evangelists as we know wrote their Gospels very carefully and wanted us to pick up from the way they described things all sorts of allusions and echoes from the Old Testament that would help us to give greater meaning to what they are relating for us. This morning I want to reflect with you on one of these echoes, which is the entry of Simon Macchabaeus into Jerusalem when this great military leader of the Jews had managed to regain control of Jerusalem after it had been in the hands of the Syrians and after the Temple had been desecrated and abandoned.
This is all recounted for us in the two books of Macchabees, very late additions to the Old Testament which were written only about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. We read that Simon expelled all the enemies from the Holy City and “cleansed the citadel from its pollutions” (I Macc 13:50) and then it says “the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches….and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel”. It seems impossible that the disciples did not have this passage in mind when they arranged for Jesus to come into Jerusalem with the crowds of his followers waving their palms – especially as the original event, the arrival of Simon Maccabaeus in triumph, was only 150 or so years before. Here, the evangelists seem to be saying, is another great leader, coming to put things right, coming to the Holy City, coming to the Temple to cleanse it, but coming unlike Simon fresh from his triumphs but in Jesus’s case ready to face his enemies and conquer them. It is interesting to see how, in Matthew Mark and Luke, the arrival of Jesus in this way, with the crowds singing hymns and waving palms, is immediately followed by the cleansing of the Temple: Mark says he went straight to the Temple “looked around at everything” but put off the cleansing of it until the next day “as it was already late” (Mk 11:11) but Matthew and Luke say he did it straightaway “And Jesus entered the Temple of God” says Matthew “and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple” (Mt 21:12) while Luke says “and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold” (Lk 19:45). The victor arrives in the Holy City which has been in the hands of the enemy and he cleanses it and makes it holy again.
Twenty years before this, in 165 BC, Simon’s brother Judas Macchabaeus had also managed to retake Jerusalem, although not permanently. The Jews were horrified when they recaptured the city and saw the state the Temple was in – there was an altar to the Greek God Zeus where the Holy of Holies had been and in chapter 4 of I Macchabees we read “they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket….”(I Macc 4:38) And now it was that a miracle occurred, for when they tried to relight the sanctuary lamp that should always burn in the Temple, there was only enough oil to last one day, but in fact it lasted eight days – time enough for them to press some fresh olives and produce a new supply of the olive oil that they burned. Because of this, the Jews declared a new feast, the feast of the rededication of the Temple, to be held every year. This is the feast that Jewish people still keep today, it falls in December around Christmas time and it is called Channukah, and it lasts for eight days. Sometimes it is also called the Feast of Lights, because the way Jewish people celebrate it is to have a special eight-branched candlestick in their homes which they light more lights one every evening that the feast lasts. The rabbis say that these lights are not “for the house within” but should be put in the doorway or on the windowsill because they are “of the house without” – they are meant to give light to the outside, not the inside. And this aspect of the entry into Jerusalem, of the making holy again, of the miraculous light which God gave to make the rededication of the Temple possible, the whole festival of Lights that the Jews held to remind themselves of these events, has its echo I think in John’s Gospel. John as you know records things always a bit differently from the other three evangelists and he has already used the story of the cleansing of the Temple by the angry Jesus much earlier on in his Gospel. But in John, showing I think that he too is thinking of these same events in recent Jewish history, soon after his entry into Jerusalem Jesus starts talking about Light. John tells us that “Jesus said to them “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light….while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light”.” (Jn 12:35-6).
Today we celebrate this solemn entry of Our Lord the victor, the cleanser, into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him to into our lives, let us ask him to make his solemn entry today into our hearts: let us ask him to expel from our hearts the enemies that lurk there – our selfishness and what our dear Holy Father calls “our mysterious complicity with sin” – let us allow him to cleanse the sanctuary of our hearts and rededicate it to God’s service. Heaven knows, the sanctuary of my heart is a bit overgrown, I have a few brambles and weeds growing there and maybe yours is in the same sad and neglected state. Now is the hour for the great cleansing of our hearts. Dear Jesus, as we rededicate ourselves to you today, give us that miraculous light that will shine into every corner of our lives to purify us, you are the Light of the World, help us to believe in the Light that we may become sons and daughters of light. Hosanna, come and save us! Amen.
Sunday 4 April 2010
Good Friday 2010
Homily for Good Friday 2 April 2010
Here we are gathered together on the saddest day in the Church’s year, the day of the death of Jesus, the day on which he mounted the Cross and died there. The Cross, so central to our Faith that it is the prime symbol of Christianity all over the world, the Cross which we shall come at the end of our Liturgy today to venerate with all our homage and our sorrow. We recall the various predictions that Jesus made –either openly or in hints to his closest companions- of his death, and the manner of it, and there is a saying of his about the Christian life in general that springs unbidden to the mind today: when Jesus says “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mt 16:24) If we are to be true followers of Christ, then we too must go the way he has gone, and go to the cross – that is to say, we must first of all recognise what our cross is, because it will be a personal cross, particular to me, and then we must deal with it, deal with whatever it is in a way that is not the way of denial, nor the way of bitterness and resentment, but the way of acceptance, so that eventually by the mysterious chemistry that always occurs when good and evil meet, this acceptance and calm realism will bring to us and to those around us nothing but good, even the greatest good, which is our salvation.
The French thinker Jean Paul Sartre developed the philosophy called existentialism, which had such a vogue in my youth. He said other people try to tell us who we are, try to label us and define us, that is why “other people are hell” – whereas in fact we should do our utmost not to let them, not to let anybody else tell us who we are, only we, in some glorious isolation, decide who we are. Complete rubbish of course, because we are constantly from our birth on caught up in a thousand criss-crossing relations with other people that all have their effect on us, just as we too are having a thousand effects on them. Our dear Holy Father spoke about this inter-relation that we are all caught up in in his book on the four last things “Eschatology” back in the 80s: he says “the being of man is not that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and in these ways it has colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves….we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny”. How does this fit in with the Cross? Because Jesus suffers on the Cross in his sacred humanity, which somehow capitulates within it the whole experience of all humanity, and consequently holds within himself all the momentum of evil that our hurts and hatreds, our vendettas and vindictiveness, have carried on creating throughout time. That is the burden of the Cross that he has to drag through the streets of the Holy City, that is the agony he has to endure, the myriad echoes within him of all our unresolved wrongs and wrongdoings that resonate ever louder down the ages. And it is there on the Cross, in his patient and willing accepting of all this, that Our Lord manages in a supreme cataclysm of love and forgiveness finally to halt all this in its tracks and to turn it round, to send it back on itself, in a new momentum of healing and forgiving, that will transform the whole mess of mankind’s sinning into a thousand new possibilities for love and for good. This is what the Psalmist means when he says (Ps 9:14) “You have seen the trouble and sorrow, you note it, you take it in hand”.
Long ago in the 5th century the saintly Bishop of Ravenna in Italy – Peter Chrysologus- compared Jesus on Good Friday going to the Cross to a farmer going out to his field, and taking with him the tool he will need to plough up the field and ensure that in due course there will be a harvest from it. Our own sins –my own flawed personality is in there too – have added to the burden and the agony, they are part of the field that needs to be tilled, but on the Cross it is all wiped out and done away with forever, the cumulative sin of all humanity and ours too, the field is worked over and made ready for its proper use, its yield. “It is accomplished” says Jesus as he dies, “consummatum est” or in the Greek one word “tetelestai”. Archaeologists have found a collection of wax tablets from a tax office from the time of Christ, and that is the word written on those accounts that have been paid off- finished, paid in full, as we might say today. It is finished, the tool of the Cross has done its work, and it only remains for us to take up our own cross and in so doing become the harvest that Jesus has toiled so hard for- to let go of the hurts people have inflicted on us and the hurts we have inflicted – our trespasses and those who trespass against us.- and to reverse in our own lives the momentum of evil and to allow his victory to cleanse us and make us whole. We are caught up forever with each other, and we are caught up forever with Our Lord, we live in the words of the Canon “through him, with him, in him”. Dear Jesus may we always live so that our fellow human beings see in us “the tokens of your love and mercy”, so that we live in them as grace and not as guilt, and let your dying words “It is finished” resonate forever in our hearts cancelling out all the harm and hurt that linger there. Amen.
Here we are gathered together on the saddest day in the Church’s year, the day of the death of Jesus, the day on which he mounted the Cross and died there. The Cross, so central to our Faith that it is the prime symbol of Christianity all over the world, the Cross which we shall come at the end of our Liturgy today to venerate with all our homage and our sorrow. We recall the various predictions that Jesus made –either openly or in hints to his closest companions- of his death, and the manner of it, and there is a saying of his about the Christian life in general that springs unbidden to the mind today: when Jesus says “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mt 16:24) If we are to be true followers of Christ, then we too must go the way he has gone, and go to the cross – that is to say, we must first of all recognise what our cross is, because it will be a personal cross, particular to me, and then we must deal with it, deal with whatever it is in a way that is not the way of denial, nor the way of bitterness and resentment, but the way of acceptance, so that eventually by the mysterious chemistry that always occurs when good and evil meet, this acceptance and calm realism will bring to us and to those around us nothing but good, even the greatest good, which is our salvation.
The French thinker Jean Paul Sartre developed the philosophy called existentialism, which had such a vogue in my youth. He said other people try to tell us who we are, try to label us and define us, that is why “other people are hell” – whereas in fact we should do our utmost not to let them, not to let anybody else tell us who we are, only we, in some glorious isolation, decide who we are. Complete rubbish of course, because we are constantly from our birth on caught up in a thousand criss-crossing relations with other people that all have their effect on us, just as we too are having a thousand effects on them. Our dear Holy Father spoke about this inter-relation that we are all caught up in in his book on the four last things “Eschatology” back in the 80s: he says “the being of man is not that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and in these ways it has colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves….we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny”. How does this fit in with the Cross? Because Jesus suffers on the Cross in his sacred humanity, which somehow capitulates within it the whole experience of all humanity, and consequently holds within himself all the momentum of evil that our hurts and hatreds, our vendettas and vindictiveness, have carried on creating throughout time. That is the burden of the Cross that he has to drag through the streets of the Holy City, that is the agony he has to endure, the myriad echoes within him of all our unresolved wrongs and wrongdoings that resonate ever louder down the ages. And it is there on the Cross, in his patient and willing accepting of all this, that Our Lord manages in a supreme cataclysm of love and forgiveness finally to halt all this in its tracks and to turn it round, to send it back on itself, in a new momentum of healing and forgiving, that will transform the whole mess of mankind’s sinning into a thousand new possibilities for love and for good. This is what the Psalmist means when he says (Ps 9:14) “You have seen the trouble and sorrow, you note it, you take it in hand”.
Long ago in the 5th century the saintly Bishop of Ravenna in Italy – Peter Chrysologus- compared Jesus on Good Friday going to the Cross to a farmer going out to his field, and taking with him the tool he will need to plough up the field and ensure that in due course there will be a harvest from it. Our own sins –my own flawed personality is in there too – have added to the burden and the agony, they are part of the field that needs to be tilled, but on the Cross it is all wiped out and done away with forever, the cumulative sin of all humanity and ours too, the field is worked over and made ready for its proper use, its yield. “It is accomplished” says Jesus as he dies, “consummatum est” or in the Greek one word “tetelestai”. Archaeologists have found a collection of wax tablets from a tax office from the time of Christ, and that is the word written on those accounts that have been paid off- finished, paid in full, as we might say today. It is finished, the tool of the Cross has done its work, and it only remains for us to take up our own cross and in so doing become the harvest that Jesus has toiled so hard for- to let go of the hurts people have inflicted on us and the hurts we have inflicted – our trespasses and those who trespass against us.- and to reverse in our own lives the momentum of evil and to allow his victory to cleanse us and make us whole. We are caught up forever with each other, and we are caught up forever with Our Lord, we live in the words of the Canon “through him, with him, in him”. Dear Jesus may we always live so that our fellow human beings see in us “the tokens of your love and mercy”, so that we live in them as grace and not as guilt, and let your dying words “It is finished” resonate forever in our hearts cancelling out all the harm and hurt that linger there. Amen.
Sunday 21 March 2010
Homily for 24 January 2010
Homily for Third Sunday of Year C 24 January 2010
I want to this morning to look at our Old Testament reading – so often we just let that first reading pass us by, don’t we, perhaps we half expect the Old Testament to be dull and boring, or even not to make sense – this is by no means an uncommon view! In fact in the first century of the Church’s history there was even a suggestion, made by the heretic Marcion, that the Church should ditch the Old Testament and leave it to the Jews- what had it got to do with us? And for several years, even in St Augustine’s time in the fourth century, there were many people who found the Old Testament so off-putting that it effectively stopped them becoming Christians at all, and our pagan opponents were very scornful of the way the Old Testament was written- so unlike all the accounts of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses written in beautiful poetry, and with all its bloodthirsty stories of war and conquest so unlike the deep thoughts, so calmly expressed, of the great philosophers like Plato. They would laugh at their Christian friends “Do you mean to tell me you actually believe all that rubbish, how can you? Just a load of Bedouins killing each other!” In fact, St Augustine himself couldn’t bring himself to become a Catholic until he heard the sermons in Milan of St Ambrose, explaining just how to approach and understand the Old Testament. So let’s look at today’s reading.
It is set in the middle of the fourth century BC when the Jews had returned from their long captivity in Babylon and were gradually rebuilding their national life and their identity as God’s holy people. Ezra was the man in charge, and he was particularly anxious that the people should reacquaint themselves with the scriptures, and with God’s Law which they contained- how else would they ever get the country off to a good start again? His right hand man in all this was Nehemiah, and today’s reading comes from his memoirs. It describes the scene at one of the great gatherings of the people that Ezra and the clergy would organise, at which all the scriptures were read. Look how the people react- they know that the scriptures are the presence of God in their midst, they know that they are hearing the Word of God addressed to them, that is why they immediately take up the posture of worship – they cry out “Amen, amen!” and they “bowed down….and prostrated themselves before the Lord”. And as well as just reading it out, we see that Ezra preaches on the Word of God, “translating and giving the sense so that the people understood what was read”. This is what we have to do at Mass every Sunday isn’t it- clergy and readers, we have to read you the scriptures so that it makes sense and you understand! A most important task, because let’s face it, how many of us have a Bible at home, and if we do how many of us open it? And of course opening it is a daunting thing in itself, it’s a bit like opening a phone book or an encyclopaedia- you’ve got to know what you are looking for and where to go. (I recommend as a user-friendly way of becoming familiar with the word of God to use one of the monthly booklets of daily readings that we have in our shop!)
Of course as they sat there –or lay there- hearing the scriptures, it didn’t make such comfortable reading to these newly returned Jews –as the demands that God was making of them sank in, as they began to grasp all the implications of the high expectations that God had of them, they felt a bit crestfallen- “they were in tears as they listened to the words of the Law”. Well, that’s not entirely a bad thing, you know- at least it meant they were taking it seriously, not just shrugging it all off as beyond them, the unrealistic demands of religion. You know what I mean! But Nehemiah encourages them and tells them that actually, although it is always an awesome, rather sobering experience to put ourselves in the presence of God and to reflect on the shortcomings of our lives contrasted to the hopes he has for each of us, nevertheless putting ourselves in this closeness to God is and can only be a source of joy. Nehemiah tells them to enjoy life- hey, it’s party time! “Go eat the fat, drink the sweet wine!” – and to share their happiness with the less fortunate- “send a portion to the man who has nothing”. It’s all there, isn’t it, our understanding not only of the presence of God in the scriptures, but even a hint of the eucharist to come in the distant future. We who come to church today, we are not unlike those Jews of Nehemiah’s time: they were returning to their faith, trying to pick up their old ways of religious practice, wanting to get it right, and in a way we are always returning aren’t we? We come to mass and as we recollect ourselves in a moment’s prayer we know our feet have strayed a bit since we were last in our pew, there have been a few things we’re uneasy about, a few moments we’d rather not dwell on – we are all always returning! We return, we show up again Sunday by Sunday, and we put ourselves once more in the presence of God- in the Tabernacle, in the Scriptures- and it is, of course it is, partly a source of sadness to us, as our conscience gives us a bit of a kick, that is why every Mass commences with the Confiteor, I confess… But the joy is greater than the sorrow, isn’t it, the joy that invades our hearts as we recognise Our Lord in our midst and know that we are in the right place, where we should be, close to the One who looks on us with eyes of welcome, of understanding and of love- he will put things right for us if we let him, for as Nehemiah knew well “the joy of the Lord is (y)our stronghold”.
Let us follow the advice in this ancient text this morning- we reverence the Word of God that we hear, for it is the living communication of the living God, addressed to us today; we take its message to our hearts; we are honest enough with ourselves to know that there is much in our lives to regret, but such is our trust in God and his love for us we rejoice. Let us go from this Mass refreshed by the presence of the Lord in his Word and in his Sacred Body – let us “eat the fat and drink the sweet wine” and let our joy in the Lord overflow into care for those we see around us who are in need- let us “send a portion to the man who has nothing prepared ready”, “for this day is sacred to our Lord”. Amen.
I want to this morning to look at our Old Testament reading – so often we just let that first reading pass us by, don’t we, perhaps we half expect the Old Testament to be dull and boring, or even not to make sense – this is by no means an uncommon view! In fact in the first century of the Church’s history there was even a suggestion, made by the heretic Marcion, that the Church should ditch the Old Testament and leave it to the Jews- what had it got to do with us? And for several years, even in St Augustine’s time in the fourth century, there were many people who found the Old Testament so off-putting that it effectively stopped them becoming Christians at all, and our pagan opponents were very scornful of the way the Old Testament was written- so unlike all the accounts of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses written in beautiful poetry, and with all its bloodthirsty stories of war and conquest so unlike the deep thoughts, so calmly expressed, of the great philosophers like Plato. They would laugh at their Christian friends “Do you mean to tell me you actually believe all that rubbish, how can you? Just a load of Bedouins killing each other!” In fact, St Augustine himself couldn’t bring himself to become a Catholic until he heard the sermons in Milan of St Ambrose, explaining just how to approach and understand the Old Testament. So let’s look at today’s reading.
It is set in the middle of the fourth century BC when the Jews had returned from their long captivity in Babylon and were gradually rebuilding their national life and their identity as God’s holy people. Ezra was the man in charge, and he was particularly anxious that the people should reacquaint themselves with the scriptures, and with God’s Law which they contained- how else would they ever get the country off to a good start again? His right hand man in all this was Nehemiah, and today’s reading comes from his memoirs. It describes the scene at one of the great gatherings of the people that Ezra and the clergy would organise, at which all the scriptures were read. Look how the people react- they know that the scriptures are the presence of God in their midst, they know that they are hearing the Word of God addressed to them, that is why they immediately take up the posture of worship – they cry out “Amen, amen!” and they “bowed down….and prostrated themselves before the Lord”. And as well as just reading it out, we see that Ezra preaches on the Word of God, “translating and giving the sense so that the people understood what was read”. This is what we have to do at Mass every Sunday isn’t it- clergy and readers, we have to read you the scriptures so that it makes sense and you understand! A most important task, because let’s face it, how many of us have a Bible at home, and if we do how many of us open it? And of course opening it is a daunting thing in itself, it’s a bit like opening a phone book or an encyclopaedia- you’ve got to know what you are looking for and where to go. (I recommend as a user-friendly way of becoming familiar with the word of God to use one of the monthly booklets of daily readings that we have in our shop!)
Of course as they sat there –or lay there- hearing the scriptures, it didn’t make such comfortable reading to these newly returned Jews –as the demands that God was making of them sank in, as they began to grasp all the implications of the high expectations that God had of them, they felt a bit crestfallen- “they were in tears as they listened to the words of the Law”. Well, that’s not entirely a bad thing, you know- at least it meant they were taking it seriously, not just shrugging it all off as beyond them, the unrealistic demands of religion. You know what I mean! But Nehemiah encourages them and tells them that actually, although it is always an awesome, rather sobering experience to put ourselves in the presence of God and to reflect on the shortcomings of our lives contrasted to the hopes he has for each of us, nevertheless putting ourselves in this closeness to God is and can only be a source of joy. Nehemiah tells them to enjoy life- hey, it’s party time! “Go eat the fat, drink the sweet wine!” – and to share their happiness with the less fortunate- “send a portion to the man who has nothing”. It’s all there, isn’t it, our understanding not only of the presence of God in the scriptures, but even a hint of the eucharist to come in the distant future. We who come to church today, we are not unlike those Jews of Nehemiah’s time: they were returning to their faith, trying to pick up their old ways of religious practice, wanting to get it right, and in a way we are always returning aren’t we? We come to mass and as we recollect ourselves in a moment’s prayer we know our feet have strayed a bit since we were last in our pew, there have been a few things we’re uneasy about, a few moments we’d rather not dwell on – we are all always returning! We return, we show up again Sunday by Sunday, and we put ourselves once more in the presence of God- in the Tabernacle, in the Scriptures- and it is, of course it is, partly a source of sadness to us, as our conscience gives us a bit of a kick, that is why every Mass commences with the Confiteor, I confess… But the joy is greater than the sorrow, isn’t it, the joy that invades our hearts as we recognise Our Lord in our midst and know that we are in the right place, where we should be, close to the One who looks on us with eyes of welcome, of understanding and of love- he will put things right for us if we let him, for as Nehemiah knew well “the joy of the Lord is (y)our stronghold”.
Let us follow the advice in this ancient text this morning- we reverence the Word of God that we hear, for it is the living communication of the living God, addressed to us today; we take its message to our hearts; we are honest enough with ourselves to know that there is much in our lives to regret, but such is our trust in God and his love for us we rejoice. Let us go from this Mass refreshed by the presence of the Lord in his Word and in his Sacred Body – let us “eat the fat and drink the sweet wine” and let our joy in the Lord overflow into care for those we see around us who are in need- let us “send a portion to the man who has nothing prepared ready”, “for this day is sacred to our Lord”. Amen.
Homily for Lent V 2010
Homily for Fifth Sunday in Lent 21 March 2010
This Gospel we have just heard is one of the most moving of all the stories of Jesus, and yet it may surprise you to know that for at least three hundred years it was not officially in the Gospels at all, and it exists in none of the most ancient manuscripts. This is not to say that it didn’t exist, but it had an existence of its own, in a sort of free-fall; it was well known but was outside the official Scriptures of the Church. We know that Christians were aware of this story because already in the early 2nd century a Bishop, Papias, who was the first person to start researching into the background of the gospels and letters that would eventually come to be recognised as what we now call the New Testament, writes that, as well as the four Gospels, there is “another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord” and there are references to it in the writings of Syrian Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It was really only thanks to St Ambrose and St Augustine that this wonderful story of Our Lord’s forbearance and gentleness was finally inserted by St Jerome into St John’s Gospel, where we find it today. Perhaps it seemed a good place to add it, because only a few verses later on in this same chapter John reports Jesus as saying (in verse 15) “You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one” and later (in verse 46) Jesus challenges the Pharisees by asking them “Which of you convicts me of sin?”
Why were those first Christians so uneasy about this story that they hesitated to include it in the Gospels? Well, I think it was paradoxically for the very same reason that we like it so much: it showed Our Lord being very lenient with someone accused of serious sexual sin. In the first centuries of the Church (a fact often overlooked by those who say we must go back to the ways of the primitive Church, by the way) it was regarded as extremely serious for believers to fall back into the ways of sin and there were many harsh and often public penances involved before such a person could hope to be accepted again into the Christian community. But as time progressed and the sacrament of Confession became better understood and more widely and frequently practised, a more compassionate approach took hold in the Church, an approach that took into account our human nature and all its weaknesses, an approach that understood that Our Lord was, in his unconditional love, always ready to give us a second chance- a second, a third, a hundredth chance. And so in the fullness of time this beautiful story came into its own.
Let us look at our Gospel reading a bit more closely. What is the motivation of the accusers who have dragged this unfortunate woman before Our Lord? First of all, it takes two to tango, doesn’t it, so where is the man who had slept with her? Moses in fact didn’t just say the woman involved had to be stoned, but the man too – he has, typically I hear you say, got off scot free, the accusers don’t seem to be bothered about him. They have caught the woman, and that is enough- but do they really care about justice being done? So often behind all the bluster of outraged so-called good and upright citizens when they are complaining loudly about the misdeeds of their neighbours, and demanding that something must be done, lies a whole mixture of dubious motives. Here they are really only interested in baiting Jesus- what will he say? Will they be able to use whatever he comes out with as ammunition against him with the authorities? But Jesus is silent, he just sits there doodling in the sand. The Fathers of the ancient Church compared this to that verse in Isaiah where God delays his judgement of Israel, saying “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself…” (Is 42:14) and some imagined that he was writing down the sins or perhaps the names of the accusers, because the prophet Jeremiah says “those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth”. (Jer 17:13) The eagerly expected condemnation does not come, and famously Our Lord- perhaps with a half-smile on his lips, who knows?- suggests that if there is anyone there who has never done anything wrong, then perhaps they should be the one to cast the first stone, and so the crowd in some embarrassment we can imagine and possibly with a certain reluctance begins to melt away.
And now comes what is for me the most important point in the story- “Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained standing there”. St Augustine loved this bit, he says “now there were only two: the wretched woman and the merciful one- misera et misericordia” That is what we have to bear in mind: when it will really matter, when we come to the end of our life, there will only be two people- me and Jesus. All the people who fill my life won’t be there any more, my loved ones won’t be around, and neither will be all the people who clutter up my life with their criticisms, their disapproval, their gossiping about me, their opinions about me, right or wrong! There will only be me and Jesus, no one else – the miserable sinner meeting the personification of the Divine Mercy. And that is the encounter we should be preparing for, especially in these last days of Lent that we now enter on, when we have so many opportunities for devotion and for the sacraments. How we hope and pray that we will find Our Lord in this loving mood of gentleness, that he will just be silent in front of all our misdoings, the goings on of our youth and all the sexual nonsense that so easily comes to the forefront of our minds and so easily sidetracks us and clouds our vision- that finally he will soothe our anguish –for we will be only too keenly aware of what we have got up to, we won’t need a crowd of accusers, our conscience will be doing a grand job on its own – he will look up at us and please God we will hear those words of all-comprehending mercy “Neither do I condemn you”. He will say those words, we hope, because he will look into our hearts and see what it was that was our true motivation in life, however obscured from time to time it may have been. Our present Holy Father in a book on death he wrote twenty years ago which I hope to share with you some insights from on Good Friday, says that the only question worth asking of ourselves will be, what did I give people? When I spoke to them, in my dealings with them, what did I give them? The answer that Pope Benedict thinks is the only answer, is Hope. Not condemnation, but hope. The Gospels show us Our Lord at work, doing precisely that- giving people hope, in whatever situation they might be, and most clearly of all, he gives hope in his response to the woman in today’s reading. Let us be people who offer each other as well as the sign of peace at this Mass, a thousand signs of hope in our daily converse with each other, hope, not condemnation, but hope. And dear Jesus, when the day comes when we stand together you and I alone may each one of us hear you say “Neither do I condemn you” as you look up and rest your loving gaze upon us your wayward friends. Say to us “Neither do I condemn you!” Amen.
This Gospel we have just heard is one of the most moving of all the stories of Jesus, and yet it may surprise you to know that for at least three hundred years it was not officially in the Gospels at all, and it exists in none of the most ancient manuscripts. This is not to say that it didn’t exist, but it had an existence of its own, in a sort of free-fall; it was well known but was outside the official Scriptures of the Church. We know that Christians were aware of this story because already in the early 2nd century a Bishop, Papias, who was the first person to start researching into the background of the gospels and letters that would eventually come to be recognised as what we now call the New Testament, writes that, as well as the four Gospels, there is “another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord” and there are references to it in the writings of Syrian Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It was really only thanks to St Ambrose and St Augustine that this wonderful story of Our Lord’s forbearance and gentleness was finally inserted by St Jerome into St John’s Gospel, where we find it today. Perhaps it seemed a good place to add it, because only a few verses later on in this same chapter John reports Jesus as saying (in verse 15) “You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one” and later (in verse 46) Jesus challenges the Pharisees by asking them “Which of you convicts me of sin?”
Why were those first Christians so uneasy about this story that they hesitated to include it in the Gospels? Well, I think it was paradoxically for the very same reason that we like it so much: it showed Our Lord being very lenient with someone accused of serious sexual sin. In the first centuries of the Church (a fact often overlooked by those who say we must go back to the ways of the primitive Church, by the way) it was regarded as extremely serious for believers to fall back into the ways of sin and there were many harsh and often public penances involved before such a person could hope to be accepted again into the Christian community. But as time progressed and the sacrament of Confession became better understood and more widely and frequently practised, a more compassionate approach took hold in the Church, an approach that took into account our human nature and all its weaknesses, an approach that understood that Our Lord was, in his unconditional love, always ready to give us a second chance- a second, a third, a hundredth chance. And so in the fullness of time this beautiful story came into its own.
Let us look at our Gospel reading a bit more closely. What is the motivation of the accusers who have dragged this unfortunate woman before Our Lord? First of all, it takes two to tango, doesn’t it, so where is the man who had slept with her? Moses in fact didn’t just say the woman involved had to be stoned, but the man too – he has, typically I hear you say, got off scot free, the accusers don’t seem to be bothered about him. They have caught the woman, and that is enough- but do they really care about justice being done? So often behind all the bluster of outraged so-called good and upright citizens when they are complaining loudly about the misdeeds of their neighbours, and demanding that something must be done, lies a whole mixture of dubious motives. Here they are really only interested in baiting Jesus- what will he say? Will they be able to use whatever he comes out with as ammunition against him with the authorities? But Jesus is silent, he just sits there doodling in the sand. The Fathers of the ancient Church compared this to that verse in Isaiah where God delays his judgement of Israel, saying “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself…” (Is 42:14) and some imagined that he was writing down the sins or perhaps the names of the accusers, because the prophet Jeremiah says “those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth”. (Jer 17:13) The eagerly expected condemnation does not come, and famously Our Lord- perhaps with a half-smile on his lips, who knows?- suggests that if there is anyone there who has never done anything wrong, then perhaps they should be the one to cast the first stone, and so the crowd in some embarrassment we can imagine and possibly with a certain reluctance begins to melt away.
And now comes what is for me the most important point in the story- “Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained standing there”. St Augustine loved this bit, he says “now there were only two: the wretched woman and the merciful one- misera et misericordia” That is what we have to bear in mind: when it will really matter, when we come to the end of our life, there will only be two people- me and Jesus. All the people who fill my life won’t be there any more, my loved ones won’t be around, and neither will be all the people who clutter up my life with their criticisms, their disapproval, their gossiping about me, their opinions about me, right or wrong! There will only be me and Jesus, no one else – the miserable sinner meeting the personification of the Divine Mercy. And that is the encounter we should be preparing for, especially in these last days of Lent that we now enter on, when we have so many opportunities for devotion and for the sacraments. How we hope and pray that we will find Our Lord in this loving mood of gentleness, that he will just be silent in front of all our misdoings, the goings on of our youth and all the sexual nonsense that so easily comes to the forefront of our minds and so easily sidetracks us and clouds our vision- that finally he will soothe our anguish –for we will be only too keenly aware of what we have got up to, we won’t need a crowd of accusers, our conscience will be doing a grand job on its own – he will look up at us and please God we will hear those words of all-comprehending mercy “Neither do I condemn you”. He will say those words, we hope, because he will look into our hearts and see what it was that was our true motivation in life, however obscured from time to time it may have been. Our present Holy Father in a book on death he wrote twenty years ago which I hope to share with you some insights from on Good Friday, says that the only question worth asking of ourselves will be, what did I give people? When I spoke to them, in my dealings with them, what did I give them? The answer that Pope Benedict thinks is the only answer, is Hope. Not condemnation, but hope. The Gospels show us Our Lord at work, doing precisely that- giving people hope, in whatever situation they might be, and most clearly of all, he gives hope in his response to the woman in today’s reading. Let us be people who offer each other as well as the sign of peace at this Mass, a thousand signs of hope in our daily converse with each other, hope, not condemnation, but hope. And dear Jesus, when the day comes when we stand together you and I alone may each one of us hear you say “Neither do I condemn you” as you look up and rest your loving gaze upon us your wayward friends. Say to us “Neither do I condemn you!” Amen.
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