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.

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.