Wednesday 16 November 2011

October 2011

Homily for Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time 23 October 2011

In today’s Gospel we see another example of the way the Pharisees and others who were hostile to Jesus tried to set traps for him- as far as they knew, he was just another wandering freelance preacher, someone with no formal theological training, just the carpenter’s son from some remote village, and they thought it would be easy enough to make a fool of him, to show him up as an ignoramus. And so they ask him very loaded questions; last week, they asked, “Should we pay taxes to this dreadful government or not?” and today they pose a question that many Jews were forever mulling over at this time – “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?”
This question was on people’s minds so much because there were just so many commandments- the Jews had of course begun with just ten, the big ten we all know as the Ten Commandments, but they had gone on and on developing more and more, we can find them all through the first five books of the Bible, until they had, believe it or not, 613! There were laws for this and laws for that, and this was forbidden and so was that. And Jews who wanted to follow take their religion seriously found themselves caught up in trying to remember to do, or not do, hundreds of things. The Pharisees in particular paid great attention to every little minor rule – you remember Jesus speaking scornfully of the way they would carefully tithe even a bunch of herbs: Luke has Jesus say “woe to you, Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of God” (Lk 11 xlii). As well as these 613 commandments, there had grown up over the centuries a whole body of interpretation of them- rather like we have the Code of Canon Law springing from our tradition and Scripture- and all these examples and case studies that the rabbis had accumulated had also come to have as it were the force of law. This is what Jesus is referring to when he says, in the very next chapter of this Gospel “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Mt 23 iv) and he denounces them in strong language: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in” (ibid xiii).

This is of course the great danger of religion, of any religion- we always run the risk as we try to become more faithful to our faith, of getting bogged down in the detail – which means that either we reach a point where we can’t see the wood for the trees anymore, or the details assume such importance for us that the whole purpose of our faith is fatally undermined and we forget why we are believers in the first place. And let’s face it, talking about and getting obsessed with the minutiae of religion, is always far safer and easier than actually living it and facing its real challenges. The great example of this I always think is the encounter Our Lord has with the Samaritan woman at the well, which we find in John’s Gospel, chapter 4. You remember, Our Lord asks her for a drink, thus breaking several taboos in one go but that’s another story. He talks to her of the living water, the life in the Holy Spirit that he wants to give her, and he sees deep into her very soul and into her life: “you have had five husbands and he whom you now have is not your husband”. This is the start of the kind of encounter Jesus wants to have with each one of us, a conversation based on reality, the reality of our present situation in life, no holds barred, no varnish. It is all too much for this woman, and so she retreats at once into discussing religion, let’s not talk about me and who I actually am and the muddle I am really in, let’s talk instead about the differences between the Samaritans and the Jews, “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship”(Jn 4 xx).
And so this muddle in the Jewish people’s minds, of how many rules and regulations have we got and do they all carry equal weight, and this terrible tendency all devout people have, of losing their way in their own smokescreen of religiosity, is what Our Lord now cuts through with his reply. He begins by quoting from Deuteronomy (6 iv,v) the great Jewish statement of faith that is always known by its first Hebrew word, the “Shema” – Jesus reminds them “ The Lord your God is one God and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” – but he changes the last word from might to mind. This is interesting, because the rabbis interpreted this as follows: your heart means your will, your soul means your life, your might means your wealth. Jesus is saying now instead, you must show your real love of God by your mind, your whole attitude to life, not just by what you put in the collection. He goes on to quote another Old Testament text, this time from Leviticus (19 xviii), which up to this point the Jews had not regarded as a first rank commandment so to speak: “you shall love your neighbour as yourself; I am the Lord”. Jesus brings this sentence out of the shadows and from now on in the Christian religion it will stay in the foreground, because as he goes on to tell us, “on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets also”.
Why are we Christians at all? Why are we here this morning? Well, either we are here and we identify ourselves as Catholic Christians because we want to live in a close relationship with God and develop that intimacy until it irrigates our whole life, or we might as well stay in bed and forget the whole thing. “Simples!” And if we are serious about being friends with God, and I know we are, even if we have a certain timidity about the prospect some days, if we want to be friends with God we will want to show him our love in the way we treat our fellow human beings – and this doesn’t mean just thinking lovely thoughts about the starving millions but how we actually treat the people we live with and work with day by day. Remember, we can only encounter Our Lord meaningfully when we do so in the reality – not the pious fiction, the reality- of our lives. That is where he waits for us, as he waits for us at the communion rails this morning. Our communion antiphon says it all: “if anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him and we shall come to him”. Jesus, we love you, we keep your word, come to us this morning, in the reality of your Body and Blood, in the reality of our lives. Amen.

Remembrance Sunday 2011

Homily for Remembrance Sunday 13 November 2011

We gather at this Mass to remember the dead of the two World Wars. In some countries in Europe they speak of Armistice Day, as we do sometimes, or of Victory Day or Heroes Day – only in this country I think have we always spoken of Remembrance Sunday, and of course each year at this time the British Legion holds its Festival of Remembrance. I’m reading at the moment a book about Athens in the fifth century BC, the time of Socrates, and I was fascinated to discover that in Athens they actually had a law against remembering bad things, so I don’t think the ancient Greeks would have approved of all this remembering that we do every November. Or would they? It all depends, doesn’t it, what we are doing all this remembering for. The Greeks at that time were against going on about all the terrible things that had happened in recent wars, because they were trying to stamp out the desire in people for revenge, for vendettas- don’t keep going on about the wrongs of the past, they said, let’s try and move on! They knew the power over us that memory has.
I want to share with you some thoughts about the power of memory, a subject that our Holy Father is very interested in and has written much about. Perhaps he became so fascinated because his hero, St Augustine, also wrote a lot about memory, which he describes in his “Confessions” as “the fields and roomy chambers of memory, where are countless treasures and images, imported into it by all manner of things by the senses”. (Bk X, viii) For Augustine memory and its power over us was all part of the problem of evil, he saw the evil that we do as individuals coming about because of our minds getting into a sort of rut, so that bad behaviour becomes a force of habit- and even eventually a compulsive force of habit that we cannot control, “consuetudo”, which “derives its strength entirely from the working of the human memory” (Peter Brown: Augustine of Hippo p149). We all experience the truth of this in our own lives.
This dark side of memory is what those Greeks wanted to ensure didn’t poison their chances of promoting a new way of living. And the Holy Father would agree. The Pope says “The Past is present through memory. Memory gives it its dangerous power in the present and causes the poison of yesterday to become the poisoning of today”. (Principles of Catholic Theology p211) He tells us that we need to find a way of looking at the past that will be what he calls a “purification of memory, that will serve to heal”. Where there has been hatred, we must put love, and in a wonderful phrase Pope Benedict says “love is made possible by a changed memory”. That is what we have to try and do, change our memory: remember the bad things- yes, without trivialising them -certainly, without pretending they didn’t happen or didn’t hurt us- but remember them if not in a good light with a positive spin as we might say then at least in some sort of neutral way, with some sort of detachment. That famous follower of St Francis, St Francis of Paola, such a great preacher in southern Italy in the 15th century, says in one of his homilies “memory of evil is an injustice, it is a sentinel who protects sins, it is the alienation of love, a nail that pierces the soul, a wickedness that never sleeps, a daily death”. Forgetting the past is not something that we can ever actually achieve, it is quite beyond us, and rightly so, because our past has made us who we are today, but the secret is, I suppose, not to let the past become a burden – what unreal, shallow people would we be if we only lived and behaved as if we had no past, only somehow creatures of the present? We cannot imagine it. So we cannot forget – but we can forgive, or try to, and then that hard and hateful past can lose its sting, lose its power over us that will otherwise poison every thought we have and reduce our lives to a “daily death”.
And so Pope Benedict speaks of the importance of the “selection of memory”, which he calls “the foundation of hope”- remembering the good things, there must have been some surely, and using these good memories to counterbalance the bad. We need hope in our lives as much as we need love, and how will we ever begin to hope, until we have freed ourselves from remembering the bad things as somehow inevitable, either as what always happens to me, because nothing I ever do comes right, I never have any luck etcetera, or because in some especially damaging way I have come to believe that bad things are all that should come to me, all some worthless person like me deserves. No, we have a past, and it contains many bad and harmful episodes for each one of us, that is sure, but we must get hold of the antidote to that poison, and the antidote is a mixture of hope and love.
And so we remember those two terrible conflicts of the last century today, and we remember also the conflicts that continue to wreck our world, we think of the bloody upheavals, far from over, all across North Africa and the Middle East. We remember them in order to pray and to work for peace. Leaders of every religion, and humanists and atheists too, have recently met at Assisi at Pope Benedict’s request, to renew their commitment to peace, to moving on from the hostile stances of the past, to being witnesses for another way of living with each other and our differences, a world in which the dignity of every human being is respected, for as the Pope said “War is a wound to human dignity”. The Archbishop of Canterbury was there and quoted a Welsh poet, Waldo Williams: “What is it to forgive? To find a way through the thorns to stand alongside our old enemy”. To remember those thorns but to get through them somehow, to come out the other side!
What is the Mass after all, but the supreme example of all this? Every Mass is a remembering isn’t it, when we return to Calvary, where we relive the injustice of Our Lord’s death on the cross, and where all of that evil, all the evil there ever has been or ever will be, is transmuted into the Good, the good of the human race, and the good of you and me. “Do this in memory of me” the priest says in persona Christi, and we must go out from Mass living that memory, making that memory real, doing that memory, in our daily lives. Dear Jesus, help us to be your memory, a force for hope and for reconciliation, in our wartorn world, for you have said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”. Amen.