Holy Family 26 December 2010

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.

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.