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.
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, 4 September 2011
23 sunday in ordinary time 2011
Homily for 23 Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A 4 September 2011
Today’s Gospel seems to me to be describing the Christian Community, the Church, in all its main aspects and functions. Here we see the Church as what it ought to be, as what it should be- what we should be at our best. A community of love, of prayer and of forgiveness. And when we live as the Church in this way, in faithfulness to God, there is Our Lord in our midst.
Let’s look at how this passage unfolds. It begins with Jesus telling us that if our brother does something wrong, we are to “go and have it out with him”. Does it matter what our brother does? Do we care? One of the first results of the Fall, as we read in Genesis 4 ix, is that we lose interest in our fellow human beings, we cease to care even to the point of killing them- you remember Cain’s great lie when God says to him “Where is Abel your brother?” – “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?” Here Jesus tells us yes, we should care, we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Our love for them must be such that we feel able to speak frankly to them when we see them going wrong. And even, maybe, we might need reinforcements- this isn’t supposed to be a kind of ganging up, bullying tactic, this bit about “take one or two others along with you”, or “take it to the whole community”, this isn’t grassing somebody up, this is partly asking us to check our take on things against the opinions of others, thinking with the mind of the Church as we might say today, making sure that we are not getting into anything too personal, too much of our own agenda and so on, and partly because in Jewish law, to make a case stick you needed two or three witnesses (Deut 19 xv says “a single witness shall not prevail against a man for any crime….only on the evidence of two witnesses….shall a charge be sustained”. (Incidentally, this is why Mary Magdalene rushes off to get Peter and John to come to the empty tomb, she knows they will need two or three witnesses to be believed.) And Our Lord does not expect we will always succeed in correcting our fellow human beings- we all have free will after all, and some of us can be very stubborn when it comes to going our own way. If someone just can’t be reasoned with, well, “treat him like a pagan or a tax collector”. Now that obviously means, if someone has deliberately put themselves outside the mainstream of the Christian community, so be it, they will have to be outsiders – but please I beg of you notice that it is the person himself who has put himself out of the community, not the community which has turned its back on him – the decision has come from the person concerned, to be on the outside. And please notice one more thing- a pagan or a gentile, and a tax collector are the examples Jesus gives of outsiders – and yet, earlier in this Gospel Matthew gives us examples of gentiles and tax collectors who actually become people of great faith- you remember the centurion in chapter 8 who wants his servant healed- his words to Jesus are newly restored to our Mass this very day with the new translation- Our Lord says to him “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith” (Mt 8 x) and the gentile woman from Tyre who asked Jesus to heal her daughter (Mt 15 xxviii) makes him say “O woman , great is your faith!” while I am sure you are already thinking of the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee in the Temple, in Luke’s Gospel where it is the humble tax collector who can only bring himself to stand at the back and say ”God be merciful to me a sinner” who receives Our Lord’s approval, “this man went down to his house justified” (Lk 18 xiii-xiv). So, people who have put themselves outside the community for whatever reason may still be capable of great faith- we are not to dismiss them even if they have dismissed themselves.
Part of this love for our brothers and sisters, part of our concern for each other is of course the need we all have to forgive and be forgiven, to let bygones be bygones, to move on, not to be forever shackled to the past. We want our brothers and sisters, however far they may be wandering from the Church, to know that nevertheless they are still in the orbit of God’s infinite mercy- the same unconditional mercy that we are rather hoping will naturally be coming our way! We need to ensure that we are the channels of pardon, not the harsh critics, for these people too. The pardon, of course, that can be fully operational for them, as for all of us, in the sacrament of confession, where the priest hearing our true contrition will loose on earth and loose in heaven our burden of guilt and free us to move on.
So we have had love and we have had pardon. Finally we have prayer, the hall mark of the Church above all- we have to be, to want to be, people of prayer, people who talk to God and let him talk to us, we need our lives to be a long unending conversation we are engaged in with God. Bur personal prayer is not enough, is it, we need to come together with our brothers and sisters in the Faith, as we are here this morning at this Mass, because here we know we can meet Our Lord in the fullest possible sense- when the priest says those words of consecration over the bread and wine, we know indeed that “where two or three meet in my name I shall be with them”. This phrase is –like the stuff about getting witnesses earlier on- also from Jewish law. The Talmud says (‘Abot 3 ii) “If two sit together and words of the Law pass between them, the divine presence abides with them”.
Dear Jesus you show us in this gospel the hallmarks of an authentic Christian community; we ask you to make us at St Saviour’s into a people who see all men and women as our brothers and sisters, worthy of our love, make us channels of forgiveness to each other and as we come together to turn our minds to the things of God, and recognise you in the Host at this Mass may your divine presence abide with us. Amen.
Today’s Gospel seems to me to be describing the Christian Community, the Church, in all its main aspects and functions. Here we see the Church as what it ought to be, as what it should be- what we should be at our best. A community of love, of prayer and of forgiveness. And when we live as the Church in this way, in faithfulness to God, there is Our Lord in our midst.
Let’s look at how this passage unfolds. It begins with Jesus telling us that if our brother does something wrong, we are to “go and have it out with him”. Does it matter what our brother does? Do we care? One of the first results of the Fall, as we read in Genesis 4 ix, is that we lose interest in our fellow human beings, we cease to care even to the point of killing them- you remember Cain’s great lie when God says to him “Where is Abel your brother?” – “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?” Here Jesus tells us yes, we should care, we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Our love for them must be such that we feel able to speak frankly to them when we see them going wrong. And even, maybe, we might need reinforcements- this isn’t supposed to be a kind of ganging up, bullying tactic, this bit about “take one or two others along with you”, or “take it to the whole community”, this isn’t grassing somebody up, this is partly asking us to check our take on things against the opinions of others, thinking with the mind of the Church as we might say today, making sure that we are not getting into anything too personal, too much of our own agenda and so on, and partly because in Jewish law, to make a case stick you needed two or three witnesses (Deut 19 xv says “a single witness shall not prevail against a man for any crime….only on the evidence of two witnesses….shall a charge be sustained”. (Incidentally, this is why Mary Magdalene rushes off to get Peter and John to come to the empty tomb, she knows they will need two or three witnesses to be believed.) And Our Lord does not expect we will always succeed in correcting our fellow human beings- we all have free will after all, and some of us can be very stubborn when it comes to going our own way. If someone just can’t be reasoned with, well, “treat him like a pagan or a tax collector”. Now that obviously means, if someone has deliberately put themselves outside the mainstream of the Christian community, so be it, they will have to be outsiders – but please I beg of you notice that it is the person himself who has put himself out of the community, not the community which has turned its back on him – the decision has come from the person concerned, to be on the outside. And please notice one more thing- a pagan or a gentile, and a tax collector are the examples Jesus gives of outsiders – and yet, earlier in this Gospel Matthew gives us examples of gentiles and tax collectors who actually become people of great faith- you remember the centurion in chapter 8 who wants his servant healed- his words to Jesus are newly restored to our Mass this very day with the new translation- Our Lord says to him “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith” (Mt 8 x) and the gentile woman from Tyre who asked Jesus to heal her daughter (Mt 15 xxviii) makes him say “O woman , great is your faith!” while I am sure you are already thinking of the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee in the Temple, in Luke’s Gospel where it is the humble tax collector who can only bring himself to stand at the back and say ”God be merciful to me a sinner” who receives Our Lord’s approval, “this man went down to his house justified” (Lk 18 xiii-xiv). So, people who have put themselves outside the community for whatever reason may still be capable of great faith- we are not to dismiss them even if they have dismissed themselves.
Part of this love for our brothers and sisters, part of our concern for each other is of course the need we all have to forgive and be forgiven, to let bygones be bygones, to move on, not to be forever shackled to the past. We want our brothers and sisters, however far they may be wandering from the Church, to know that nevertheless they are still in the orbit of God’s infinite mercy- the same unconditional mercy that we are rather hoping will naturally be coming our way! We need to ensure that we are the channels of pardon, not the harsh critics, for these people too. The pardon, of course, that can be fully operational for them, as for all of us, in the sacrament of confession, where the priest hearing our true contrition will loose on earth and loose in heaven our burden of guilt and free us to move on.
So we have had love and we have had pardon. Finally we have prayer, the hall mark of the Church above all- we have to be, to want to be, people of prayer, people who talk to God and let him talk to us, we need our lives to be a long unending conversation we are engaged in with God. Bur personal prayer is not enough, is it, we need to come together with our brothers and sisters in the Faith, as we are here this morning at this Mass, because here we know we can meet Our Lord in the fullest possible sense- when the priest says those words of consecration over the bread and wine, we know indeed that “where two or three meet in my name I shall be with them”. This phrase is –like the stuff about getting witnesses earlier on- also from Jewish law. The Talmud says (‘Abot 3 ii) “If two sit together and words of the Law pass between them, the divine presence abides with them”.
Dear Jesus you show us in this gospel the hallmarks of an authentic Christian community; we ask you to make us at St Saviour’s into a people who see all men and women as our brothers and sisters, worthy of our love, make us channels of forgiveness to each other and as we come together to turn our minds to the things of God, and recognise you in the Host at this Mass may your divine presence abide with us. Amen.
19th sunday in ordinary time 2011
Homily for 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time 7 August 2011
Today’s gospel is from that crowded chapter 14 of Matthew’s Gospel, the same chapter that gave us last week’s reading about the Feeding of the 5000. Both that episode and today’s account of Jesus walking on the water are telling us the same thing in different ways- they are revealing to the disciples and to us the divinity of our Lord, they are showing to us that Jesus is divine because we can see him doing god-like things, things that only God can do. Last week miraculously feeding his followers in the desert, conjuring up food out of nowhere for them, like God fed the Israelites with the manna from Heaven; this week walking on the water and ignoring the wind and the waves, as the Old Testament shows God doing again and again, controlling the elements, from that first setting of the waters behind their boundaries that allows the dry land to emerge and the world to get started in Genesis, on through the parting of the Red Sea – I’m sure loads of examples are springing to mind! A verse in Isaiah (43 xvi) speaks of “the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters” and that is exactly what Matthew shows Jesus doing here.
But there is more in this passage to show us that Jesus is God. When they see Jesus walking towards them, the disciples are panic-stricken and think he’s a ghost. So to reassure them Our Lord calls out to them- and what does he say? In this translation, he says “it is I”, but in the Greek original he just says “I am” – ego eimi – “I am”. This of course is the name of God, “I am”. Do you remember when God first manifests himself to Moses in the burning bush, Moses asks God to tell him his name- (Exod 3 xiii-xv) and “God said to Moses ‘I am who I am’ and he said ‘say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you’….’this is my name for ever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations’.” So God’s name is I am- funny sort of name, you may be thinking, but I think it means existence, life, being – God is all of that, isn’t he? The force that maintains all of life in being? But we digress. Here Jesus uses the divine name of himself- we get this a lot in John’s gospel more than in the others, lots of “I am” quotes from Jesus, you can think of plenty of them I know: I am the good shepherd, I am the light of the world, I am the way, the truth and the life. Here in Matthew just on its own “I am”. Another proof of his divinity- and there is one more to come.
Peter gets in a mess in this story doesn’t he, he loses his nerve and starts to sink in the water. He cries out “Lord, save me!” And we read “Jesus put out his hand at once and held him”. This too is a godlike moment, because God saves his people, and the favourite way the Jews had of describing this was to use the phrase “God stretched out his hand”, and the usual image they used of being in trouble was being in the water. For instance, Psalm 144 (vii) asks God to “stretch forth thy hand from on high, rescue me and deliver me from the many waters….” Psalm 18 (xvi) says God “reached me from on high, he took me, he drew me out of many waters” and another psalm, 107 (xxviii-ix), has “they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed”. So in this reading today we see Matthew determined to show us Jesus in his divinity- we have a Jesus who is in control of the forces of nature, and a Jesus who is always ready to save us.
And now I think we must look for a moment at Peter in this story. We are so used to thinking of Mark’s gospel as the place where we have all the little extras about Peter- after all, long tradition assures us that Mark was the confidant of Peter and that Peter’s memoirs underlie Mark’s Gospel- it is a bit of a surprise for us to realise that this episode, so typical of the rash and impetuous Peter and all the scrapes his enthusiasm got him into, is unique to Matthew. I think- I go out on my own here- that Peter is in this story standing for every Christian, he is here as an example of the typical follower of Our Lord, he is here as a representative of ordinary Christians like you and me. He is as Jesus calls him the “man of little faith”. We blow hot and cold, don’t we; we want to be good and loyal followers of Our Lord, we want to be good catholics, we want to do our bit for the Kingdom of Heaven and its advancement, but that’s on a good day! There are other days when we are not so keen on the whole damn business of the Christian life, when we feel we’ve had enough of the Church thank you, when our lives are not serene and calm but there’s a few storms brewing up and the cares of the world or the lure of its easy pleasures seem suddenly very strong and likely to blow us off course once and for all. Had any of those days? I get them quite often I must say! But here’s the important thing: we are like Peter in that we want to jump in and follow Our Lord right now, of course we do and here we go, but we are like him in that once we have set out on the Christian life, we feel the force of the wind, and we take fright and like him we start to sink. When we get that sinking feeling, we must be like Peter too- we must not hesitate but cry out “Lord, save me!” because Our Lord is there, isn’t he, always waiting to catch us!
Dear Jesus, we recognise you in all your humanity and in all your divinity. We know that shortly you will come upon this altar and be truly present to us in your body and blood, soul and divinity. You know we are people of little faith, we often feel the force of the wind, we often begin to sink. Come to us, dear Jesus, when we call upon you! Come to us, put out your hand at once and hold us! In St Saviour’s we are in the boat with Peter, the boat that is your Catholic Church, and here we bow down before you and say with those first disciples “Truly you are the Son of God”. Amen.
Today’s gospel is from that crowded chapter 14 of Matthew’s Gospel, the same chapter that gave us last week’s reading about the Feeding of the 5000. Both that episode and today’s account of Jesus walking on the water are telling us the same thing in different ways- they are revealing to the disciples and to us the divinity of our Lord, they are showing to us that Jesus is divine because we can see him doing god-like things, things that only God can do. Last week miraculously feeding his followers in the desert, conjuring up food out of nowhere for them, like God fed the Israelites with the manna from Heaven; this week walking on the water and ignoring the wind and the waves, as the Old Testament shows God doing again and again, controlling the elements, from that first setting of the waters behind their boundaries that allows the dry land to emerge and the world to get started in Genesis, on through the parting of the Red Sea – I’m sure loads of examples are springing to mind! A verse in Isaiah (43 xvi) speaks of “the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters” and that is exactly what Matthew shows Jesus doing here.
But there is more in this passage to show us that Jesus is God. When they see Jesus walking towards them, the disciples are panic-stricken and think he’s a ghost. So to reassure them Our Lord calls out to them- and what does he say? In this translation, he says “it is I”, but in the Greek original he just says “I am” – ego eimi – “I am”. This of course is the name of God, “I am”. Do you remember when God first manifests himself to Moses in the burning bush, Moses asks God to tell him his name- (Exod 3 xiii-xv) and “God said to Moses ‘I am who I am’ and he said ‘say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you’….’this is my name for ever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations’.” So God’s name is I am- funny sort of name, you may be thinking, but I think it means existence, life, being – God is all of that, isn’t he? The force that maintains all of life in being? But we digress. Here Jesus uses the divine name of himself- we get this a lot in John’s gospel more than in the others, lots of “I am” quotes from Jesus, you can think of plenty of them I know: I am the good shepherd, I am the light of the world, I am the way, the truth and the life. Here in Matthew just on its own “I am”. Another proof of his divinity- and there is one more to come.
Peter gets in a mess in this story doesn’t he, he loses his nerve and starts to sink in the water. He cries out “Lord, save me!” And we read “Jesus put out his hand at once and held him”. This too is a godlike moment, because God saves his people, and the favourite way the Jews had of describing this was to use the phrase “God stretched out his hand”, and the usual image they used of being in trouble was being in the water. For instance, Psalm 144 (vii) asks God to “stretch forth thy hand from on high, rescue me and deliver me from the many waters….” Psalm 18 (xvi) says God “reached me from on high, he took me, he drew me out of many waters” and another psalm, 107 (xxviii-ix), has “they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed”. So in this reading today we see Matthew determined to show us Jesus in his divinity- we have a Jesus who is in control of the forces of nature, and a Jesus who is always ready to save us.
And now I think we must look for a moment at Peter in this story. We are so used to thinking of Mark’s gospel as the place where we have all the little extras about Peter- after all, long tradition assures us that Mark was the confidant of Peter and that Peter’s memoirs underlie Mark’s Gospel- it is a bit of a surprise for us to realise that this episode, so typical of the rash and impetuous Peter and all the scrapes his enthusiasm got him into, is unique to Matthew. I think- I go out on my own here- that Peter is in this story standing for every Christian, he is here as an example of the typical follower of Our Lord, he is here as a representative of ordinary Christians like you and me. He is as Jesus calls him the “man of little faith”. We blow hot and cold, don’t we; we want to be good and loyal followers of Our Lord, we want to be good catholics, we want to do our bit for the Kingdom of Heaven and its advancement, but that’s on a good day! There are other days when we are not so keen on the whole damn business of the Christian life, when we feel we’ve had enough of the Church thank you, when our lives are not serene and calm but there’s a few storms brewing up and the cares of the world or the lure of its easy pleasures seem suddenly very strong and likely to blow us off course once and for all. Had any of those days? I get them quite often I must say! But here’s the important thing: we are like Peter in that we want to jump in and follow Our Lord right now, of course we do and here we go, but we are like him in that once we have set out on the Christian life, we feel the force of the wind, and we take fright and like him we start to sink. When we get that sinking feeling, we must be like Peter too- we must not hesitate but cry out “Lord, save me!” because Our Lord is there, isn’t he, always waiting to catch us!
Dear Jesus, we recognise you in all your humanity and in all your divinity. We know that shortly you will come upon this altar and be truly present to us in your body and blood, soul and divinity. You know we are people of little faith, we often feel the force of the wind, we often begin to sink. Come to us, dear Jesus, when we call upon you! Come to us, put out your hand at once and hold us! In St Saviour’s we are in the boat with Peter, the boat that is your Catholic Church, and here we bow down before you and say with those first disciples “Truly you are the Son of God”. Amen.
Saturday, 2 July 2011
14th Sunday of Year 3 July 2011
Homily for Fourteenth Sunday in ordinary Time 3 July 2011
Two weeks ago it was Trinity Sunday when the Church asked us to reflect on the very nature of God- what is God like, what kind of god is our God? We have to stretch our minds a bit when we try to understand God and to get our heads round the implications of this idea that God is Love, as St John tells us in his First Letter. Luckily, Trinity Sunday is quickly followed by the feast we celebrated Friday of the Sacred Heart and that Letter of John is read at Friday’s Mass to put into simple language for us what all this means- you remember, it contains those wonderful words “everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” and again “no one has ever seen God but as long as we love one another God will live in us”. God will live in us! That is the extraordinary thing that St Paul tells us in today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans, when he says “the Spirit of God has made his home in you” and again “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you”.
You see, the great thing about the Trinity, which as you know is only our technical term for the inner life of God and nothing to do with clover leaves at all, the great thing about the Trinity is that it is the constant momentum of love, the give and take of love between the Father and the Son, and that give and take, that flow of love, that fountain of love, is the Holy Spirit, a fountain which gushes out and inundates us all. Because one of great things about God is that he is not some remote aloof deity, about whom we know nothing and who wants to be left alone on some mountain top or in some grove as the pagans thought of their gods, whom you approached at your peril. God is forever approaching us one way or another, approaching us of course in the Incarnation, taking human form, and being one of us, so to speak, so we could get a better idea of what he has destined each one of us for by looking at the life of Our Lord Jesus; but approaching us constantly too in the form of the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us from our baptism onwards and forever prompting us towards the good and helping us to steer clear of the bad, so that as St Paul says today “there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives”. We have the Spirit, forever enlightening our minds if we will let him, so that the things of God become a bit clearer. That is why in the early centuries of the Church baptism was often called simply enlightenment; the fathers thought that once you had been baptised and had the Holy Spirit living in you, you would inevitably see things a bit clearer – a bit like having your eyes fixed by laser treatment!
You know I expect that famous icon of the Trinity, by the 15th century Russian monk Andrei Rublev, which is based on the famous story in Genesis 18 of Abraham entertaining the three young men who suddenly turn up at his tent hungry and thirsty. From earliest times the Church saw in these three young men a hint if you like, a foreshadowing, of the Trinity- especially as although they are three, Abraham talks to them as if they are one, saying “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant” (Gen 18 iii). This is God calling on Abraham, God hungry and thirsty, God wanting something from us. This is the God we know, isn’t it, this thirsty God, this is what St Margaret Mary understood in her visions of the Sacred Heart, when she saw Jesus thirsting for our souls, and the great desire he has for our love. This is the God we know who is forever patient with us, forever waiting for some response from us, some flicker of interest, however slight! A modern French writer says “devant notre mediocrité, Dieu attend” – confronted by our mediocrity, God just waits! And of course in this story in Genesis, Abraham does respond, he prepares a meal in the shade of the oaks of Mamre for his divine guests. This icon of Rublev’s shows the three young men sitting down to their refreshment, and one of them is looking out of the picture at us- the one dressed in green. Now we use red as our liturgical colour for the Holy Spirit, don’t we, because we think of the tongues of fire at Pentecost, but our orthodox brothers and sisters use green for the Holy Spirit, the colour of growth, of the green shoots springing up that signify rebirth. So it is the Holy Spirit who is the part of the Godhead who is forever looking out at us, not snooping on us to catch us out in some sin so he can jot it down, he is not a traffic warden, no, he is just gazing out at us with a look of love, and with perhaps an invitation in his look too. I say an invitation because if you look at this icon you see that there is a space at the table where the young men are sitting, because you see the Holy Spirit is asking us to join them, come into the life of God, come and take your place at the table, come on in, make yourself at home – you know that old music hall song, “put your feet on the mantel shelf, go to the cupboard and help yourself!” Come on in, says the Holy Spirit, don’t be out there in the cold, come on in and be at home with God who wants above all to live with us!
How do we take up this pressing invitation? How do we step into the life of God and sit at God’s table, how do we enjoy the companionship of God? St John in that first Letter of his shows us the answer, and the answer is love- when we do anything from an impulse of love, when we act lovingly and kindly towards someone, especially if they are someone we don’t like or fancy or don’t approve of very much, then we are doing something godlike, and in that moment, in the doing of that act of love, we are caught up into the life of God- the more acts of love we do, the more our life is oriented to this way of loving, the closer we shall be to God – we shall be, whether we realise it or not, slap bang in the middle of the life of the Trinity, seated at the table sharing in the heavenly banquet.
Dear friends, think of St Saviour’s as the oaks of Mamre, where our hungry and thirsty God is waiting for us to greet him and to offer him our companionship. The word companion you know is from Latin words that mean “with bread”, someone you share bread with. God is waiting for our response of love tonight, he is waiting to show us his love in the breaking and sharing of bread, the bread that is the sacred Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord. God in Three Persons, we welcome you, we say with Abraham “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass your servant by”. Come to us, make our home with us, live in us and let us live in you, help us to accept our place at your table, to take on our part in the outpouring of your love out into our world. “Do not pass your servant by”. Amen.
Two weeks ago it was Trinity Sunday when the Church asked us to reflect on the very nature of God- what is God like, what kind of god is our God? We have to stretch our minds a bit when we try to understand God and to get our heads round the implications of this idea that God is Love, as St John tells us in his First Letter. Luckily, Trinity Sunday is quickly followed by the feast we celebrated Friday of the Sacred Heart and that Letter of John is read at Friday’s Mass to put into simple language for us what all this means- you remember, it contains those wonderful words “everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” and again “no one has ever seen God but as long as we love one another God will live in us”. God will live in us! That is the extraordinary thing that St Paul tells us in today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans, when he says “the Spirit of God has made his home in you” and again “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you”.
You see, the great thing about the Trinity, which as you know is only our technical term for the inner life of God and nothing to do with clover leaves at all, the great thing about the Trinity is that it is the constant momentum of love, the give and take of love between the Father and the Son, and that give and take, that flow of love, that fountain of love, is the Holy Spirit, a fountain which gushes out and inundates us all. Because one of great things about God is that he is not some remote aloof deity, about whom we know nothing and who wants to be left alone on some mountain top or in some grove as the pagans thought of their gods, whom you approached at your peril. God is forever approaching us one way or another, approaching us of course in the Incarnation, taking human form, and being one of us, so to speak, so we could get a better idea of what he has destined each one of us for by looking at the life of Our Lord Jesus; but approaching us constantly too in the form of the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us from our baptism onwards and forever prompting us towards the good and helping us to steer clear of the bad, so that as St Paul says today “there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives”. We have the Spirit, forever enlightening our minds if we will let him, so that the things of God become a bit clearer. That is why in the early centuries of the Church baptism was often called simply enlightenment; the fathers thought that once you had been baptised and had the Holy Spirit living in you, you would inevitably see things a bit clearer – a bit like having your eyes fixed by laser treatment!
You know I expect that famous icon of the Trinity, by the 15th century Russian monk Andrei Rublev, which is based on the famous story in Genesis 18 of Abraham entertaining the three young men who suddenly turn up at his tent hungry and thirsty. From earliest times the Church saw in these three young men a hint if you like, a foreshadowing, of the Trinity- especially as although they are three, Abraham talks to them as if they are one, saying “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant” (Gen 18 iii). This is God calling on Abraham, God hungry and thirsty, God wanting something from us. This is the God we know, isn’t it, this thirsty God, this is what St Margaret Mary understood in her visions of the Sacred Heart, when she saw Jesus thirsting for our souls, and the great desire he has for our love. This is the God we know who is forever patient with us, forever waiting for some response from us, some flicker of interest, however slight! A modern French writer says “devant notre mediocrité, Dieu attend” – confronted by our mediocrity, God just waits! And of course in this story in Genesis, Abraham does respond, he prepares a meal in the shade of the oaks of Mamre for his divine guests. This icon of Rublev’s shows the three young men sitting down to their refreshment, and one of them is looking out of the picture at us- the one dressed in green. Now we use red as our liturgical colour for the Holy Spirit, don’t we, because we think of the tongues of fire at Pentecost, but our orthodox brothers and sisters use green for the Holy Spirit, the colour of growth, of the green shoots springing up that signify rebirth. So it is the Holy Spirit who is the part of the Godhead who is forever looking out at us, not snooping on us to catch us out in some sin so he can jot it down, he is not a traffic warden, no, he is just gazing out at us with a look of love, and with perhaps an invitation in his look too. I say an invitation because if you look at this icon you see that there is a space at the table where the young men are sitting, because you see the Holy Spirit is asking us to join them, come into the life of God, come and take your place at the table, come on in, make yourself at home – you know that old music hall song, “put your feet on the mantel shelf, go to the cupboard and help yourself!” Come on in, says the Holy Spirit, don’t be out there in the cold, come on in and be at home with God who wants above all to live with us!
How do we take up this pressing invitation? How do we step into the life of God and sit at God’s table, how do we enjoy the companionship of God? St John in that first Letter of his shows us the answer, and the answer is love- when we do anything from an impulse of love, when we act lovingly and kindly towards someone, especially if they are someone we don’t like or fancy or don’t approve of very much, then we are doing something godlike, and in that moment, in the doing of that act of love, we are caught up into the life of God- the more acts of love we do, the more our life is oriented to this way of loving, the closer we shall be to God – we shall be, whether we realise it or not, slap bang in the middle of the life of the Trinity, seated at the table sharing in the heavenly banquet.
Dear friends, think of St Saviour’s as the oaks of Mamre, where our hungry and thirsty God is waiting for us to greet him and to offer him our companionship. The word companion you know is from Latin words that mean “with bread”, someone you share bread with. God is waiting for our response of love tonight, he is waiting to show us his love in the breaking and sharing of bread, the bread that is the sacred Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord. God in Three Persons, we welcome you, we say with Abraham “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass your servant by”. Come to us, make our home with us, live in us and let us live in you, help us to accept our place at your table, to take on our part in the outpouring of your love out into our world. “Do not pass your servant by”. Amen.
trinity sunday 2011
Homily for Trinity Sunday 19 June 2011
Today is Trinity Sunday (whatever that means, do I hear you say?). During the course of the year the Church proposes many aspects of God for us to consider in the various feasts that come and go - last week the great mystery of the work of God the Holy Spirit claimed our attention at Pentecost. Now today what are we supposed to be focussing on? The Trinity, but what is the Trinity? This word is quite simply the technical term the Church has been using for nearly two millennia to describe the life of God, the nature of God. So today we need to refresh our memories about God- who is this God who is our God? What kind of a god is God? And does it matter?
The best place where we find the answer is in the two creation accounts in Genesis, where we find that God is the benevolent Creator, who approves of everything that he makes and whose desire is for intimacy with the human race which he has created in his own image and likeness- yes, God wants us to be his friends, that is the whole point of creating this world and us in it. That is what God does all day- creating, sustaining, loving us. The great Dominican mystic of the 13th century Meister Eckhard said “I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it”. In the early 18th century an English spiritual writer from the Anglican tradition, William Law, has this to say: “from eternity to eternity no spark of wrath ever was or ever will be in the holy triune God….and this, for this plain reason, because he is in himself in his Holy Trinity nothing else but the boundless abyss of all that is good and sweet and amiable” He says too that God is in “an eternal impossibility of willing and intending a moment’s pain or hurt to any creature”. What wonderful words, and they are true. If you look at the two forms of the Opening Prayer for today’s mass, you see all this spelt out. In the first one, we hear that God the Father sends us the Word (Jesus, of course) to bring us truth and the Spirit to make us holy- that is how we can come to know the mystery of God’s life. The second one speaks of God “drawing us to share in your life and your love”.
And look at our first reading today. In this episode from Exodus, Moses has just told God that, far from welcoming the ten commandments as the start of a close and binding relationship between God and his people, the Israelites have rejected them and have made themselves a nice new god, a Golden Calf they can dance around. You remember, Moses got so angry he smashed the first lot of tablets up. What we have here is God saying to Moses, it’s OK, I can cope- I am “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. And he gives Moses two new tablets, just as good as the old ones- this time, try not to break them! – and so this contract that God so desperately wants to have with his people is back in force, as if it had never been spoilt. That is what happens when we go to Confession isn’t it- we have broken a few commandments I daresay (in fact, I wonder if you examine your conscience by going through the ten commandments, that used to be a very common and very good practice), we have messed up, but we know that the priest we confess to will be the voice of the “God of tenderness” who is “slow to anger” – when we say like Moses “forgive us our faults and our sins” and ask to be back in the close friendship of God Our Lord will indeed “adopt us as his heritage” and all will be well again, as if –just as if- we’d never gone off the rails in the first place. Now that is exactly what this Gospel of ours today is saying, isn’t it. “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”.
Why send his Son at all? That is another question, and one to which books of devotion give usually quite crazy answers- paying the ransom for sin, settling mankind’s debt with the Devil, I can’t bear it! God, being goodness itself, is forever communicating that goodness- it is as simple as that. And Jesus is the good that God the Father wants to communicate to us. This man William Law speaks of “the goodness of God breaking forth into a desire to communicate good….He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of all that is good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity”. And of course the greatest good he communicates to us is that aspect, that humanly knowable aspect, of himself that is Our Lord Jesus.
Of course, such is the madness, the perversity of the human race that we run a mile at the prospect of a God offering us relentless love- just as we often do when our fellow human beings offer us love, it is just too frightening, we think, to fall into that embrace of Someone who claims they will never let go of us no matter what. We want more independence than that, because surely all this constant loving is going to be stifling, isn’t it going to curtail my freedom severely? So thought the Israelites at Mt Sinai, who, when they first heard that Moses and God were holding this great converse from which came the Ten Commandments, “were afraid and trembled and stood afar off” (Exod 20 xviii- xix) and begged to hear no more- “let not God speak to us”. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews refers to this episode too when he speaks of “a Voice, whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them”. (Heb 12 xix) Bring on the Golden Calf we say, we know where we are with that! Our dear Holy Father spoke only last week about this very phenomenon, the Golden Calf- he says “this is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to avoid the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god who corresponds with one’s own plans, one’s own projects”. (8 june 2011 gen aud)
No, dear friends, we don’t want to avoid the divine mystery, we want to meet it and live in it! We want our full destiny as children of God, and that is nothing less than to be drawn into the divine mystery that is the life and love of God. Heavenly Father, we keep smashing up the tablets of the law that are written on our hearts, but we recall today that you are “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness”; we are indeed in the words of Moses “a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins and adopt us as your heritage” Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday (whatever that means, do I hear you say?). During the course of the year the Church proposes many aspects of God for us to consider in the various feasts that come and go - last week the great mystery of the work of God the Holy Spirit claimed our attention at Pentecost. Now today what are we supposed to be focussing on? The Trinity, but what is the Trinity? This word is quite simply the technical term the Church has been using for nearly two millennia to describe the life of God, the nature of God. So today we need to refresh our memories about God- who is this God who is our God? What kind of a god is God? And does it matter?
The best place where we find the answer is in the two creation accounts in Genesis, where we find that God is the benevolent Creator, who approves of everything that he makes and whose desire is for intimacy with the human race which he has created in his own image and likeness- yes, God wants us to be his friends, that is the whole point of creating this world and us in it. That is what God does all day- creating, sustaining, loving us. The great Dominican mystic of the 13th century Meister Eckhard said “I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it”. In the early 18th century an English spiritual writer from the Anglican tradition, William Law, has this to say: “from eternity to eternity no spark of wrath ever was or ever will be in the holy triune God….and this, for this plain reason, because he is in himself in his Holy Trinity nothing else but the boundless abyss of all that is good and sweet and amiable” He says too that God is in “an eternal impossibility of willing and intending a moment’s pain or hurt to any creature”. What wonderful words, and they are true. If you look at the two forms of the Opening Prayer for today’s mass, you see all this spelt out. In the first one, we hear that God the Father sends us the Word (Jesus, of course) to bring us truth and the Spirit to make us holy- that is how we can come to know the mystery of God’s life. The second one speaks of God “drawing us to share in your life and your love”.
And look at our first reading today. In this episode from Exodus, Moses has just told God that, far from welcoming the ten commandments as the start of a close and binding relationship between God and his people, the Israelites have rejected them and have made themselves a nice new god, a Golden Calf they can dance around. You remember, Moses got so angry he smashed the first lot of tablets up. What we have here is God saying to Moses, it’s OK, I can cope- I am “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. And he gives Moses two new tablets, just as good as the old ones- this time, try not to break them! – and so this contract that God so desperately wants to have with his people is back in force, as if it had never been spoilt. That is what happens when we go to Confession isn’t it- we have broken a few commandments I daresay (in fact, I wonder if you examine your conscience by going through the ten commandments, that used to be a very common and very good practice), we have messed up, but we know that the priest we confess to will be the voice of the “God of tenderness” who is “slow to anger” – when we say like Moses “forgive us our faults and our sins” and ask to be back in the close friendship of God Our Lord will indeed “adopt us as his heritage” and all will be well again, as if –just as if- we’d never gone off the rails in the first place. Now that is exactly what this Gospel of ours today is saying, isn’t it. “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”.
Why send his Son at all? That is another question, and one to which books of devotion give usually quite crazy answers- paying the ransom for sin, settling mankind’s debt with the Devil, I can’t bear it! God, being goodness itself, is forever communicating that goodness- it is as simple as that. And Jesus is the good that God the Father wants to communicate to us. This man William Law speaks of “the goodness of God breaking forth into a desire to communicate good….He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of all that is good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity”. And of course the greatest good he communicates to us is that aspect, that humanly knowable aspect, of himself that is Our Lord Jesus.
Of course, such is the madness, the perversity of the human race that we run a mile at the prospect of a God offering us relentless love- just as we often do when our fellow human beings offer us love, it is just too frightening, we think, to fall into that embrace of Someone who claims they will never let go of us no matter what. We want more independence than that, because surely all this constant loving is going to be stifling, isn’t it going to curtail my freedom severely? So thought the Israelites at Mt Sinai, who, when they first heard that Moses and God were holding this great converse from which came the Ten Commandments, “were afraid and trembled and stood afar off” (Exod 20 xviii- xix) and begged to hear no more- “let not God speak to us”. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews refers to this episode too when he speaks of “a Voice, whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them”. (Heb 12 xix) Bring on the Golden Calf we say, we know where we are with that! Our dear Holy Father spoke only last week about this very phenomenon, the Golden Calf- he says “this is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to avoid the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god who corresponds with one’s own plans, one’s own projects”. (8 june 2011 gen aud)
No, dear friends, we don’t want to avoid the divine mystery, we want to meet it and live in it! We want our full destiny as children of God, and that is nothing less than to be drawn into the divine mystery that is the life and love of God. Heavenly Father, we keep smashing up the tablets of the law that are written on our hearts, but we recall today that you are “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness”; we are indeed in the words of Moses “a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins and adopt us as your heritage” Amen.
Monday, 9 May 2011
Good Friday 2011
Good Friday 22 April 2011
The question that I keep wrestling with as I have been pondering on the Passion narrative we have just heard, is that question that someone asks Peter after Jesus has been arrested and is being detained for questioning at the High Priest’s house: “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” St John is alone of the four evangelists in using this word garden- today’s Passion opened with Jesus crossing the Kedron valley to go to the Mount of Olives, and immediately we read “There was a garden there, and he went into it with his disciples”. At the end of the Passion too, we are back in a garden- because John tells us “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried”. What are we to make of this? What is this garden?
I am sure your minds have immediately turned to the first time in the whole Bible when we hear about a garden- the ancient account of the creation of the world that we have in Genesis chapter 2 where the best way the Jews of those distant centuries could think of to describe the way things ought to be, the easy, harmonious relationship humanity ought to have with God, was to call it a garden. A place of beauty, order, calm. We read “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man whom he had formed”, (Gen 2 viii). Of course, this happy innocent state of being at peace and at one with God did not last, for as we know the garden was the place of the yielding of Adam and Eve to the blandishments of the Devil, of the initial and far-reaching disobedience of mankind, which resulted in exile from the garden. From now on, our human destiny was going to be a far more complicated affair, our relationship with God hard to discern and maintain, our basic sinfulness forever getting in the way – “therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden….to till the ground from which he was taken”. (Gen 3 xxiii).
All this has been discussed by the Holy Father in his latest book- I quote “John’s use of the word garden is an unmistakeable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here” (J of N II p149). The place of Adam’s disobedience will now be the place of the new Adam’s obedience – “even to accepting death, death on a cross”. The place where Adam and Eve are tempted and decide just to do their own thing and hang the consequences will be the place where Our Lord was, as it tells us in Hebrews “tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin” and where he prays to the Father “Not as I will, but as thou wilt….thy will be done” (Mt 26 xxxix, xlii). As Pope Benedict comments “It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history”. (ibid p150)
Of course in the garden of Eden everything depends on one thing: the Tree. What is this tree, and what is our attitude to it? Genesis speaks of “the tree of life….in the midst of the garden….the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2 ix). This tree is what everything revolves around in the drama of the Fall, everything depends on it, hangs on it- God says to Adam and Eve leave these things to God, accept that there are moral absolutes of good and evil, that it is not a question of “Does it feel good to me?” but “Is it good?”. Accept these limits to your freedom and all will be well. Do not interfere with the Tree! Do not start rearranging what is good and what is evil, leave well alone or we shall have chaos, a world where nothing is certain but everything, good and evil, just a matter of opinion. Well, we’ve got that!
And now in another garden there stands another Tree, a Tree on which everything depends, a Tree on which everything- everyone even- hangs in the tortured body of Our Lord Jesus himself. This Tree, the Cross, is the Tree of Life isn’t it, this is the place where good and evil are known, where good and evil meet for their ultimate combat. As we shall shortly be singing “This is the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world”. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, I think from the 9th century, “The Dream of the Rood”, one of the glories of the pre-Reformation devotional literature of this country, in which the Tree, the Cross, speaks. Here is a bit of it: “Men shifted me on their shoulders and set me on a hill….I saw the Lord of Mankind hasten with such courage to climb upon me. I dared not bow or break there, against my Lord’s wish, when I saw the surface of the earth tremble….Then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.” The poet shows us a Christ who is not coerced by soldiers, not forced onto the cross, but a Jesus who is serenely in control, “firm and unflinching” as he climbs onto the Tree as a warrior ready to do battle.
Dear friends, we are in that garden today, at this Solemn Liturgy we step, as at every Mass, outside of time and stand in eternity- this is the hour, this is the moment! We are in the garden, we are up against the reality of the garden, the reality of how we can be reconciled to God and live again in his friendship, that reality as we know is the Tree, the Cross! How we want to stay in this garden, to live our lives always in friendship with God, in the garden of his intimacy. And at the end of our earthly lives, when we too come to die, let us have our answer ready to that question put to Peter- “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” “Yes, I was there, I was there when they nailed him to the Tree”. Dear Jesus, help us! Help us to stay close to you in the garden, even if that means, as we know it does, that we have to stay close to the tree that is your Cross. Amen.
The question that I keep wrestling with as I have been pondering on the Passion narrative we have just heard, is that question that someone asks Peter after Jesus has been arrested and is being detained for questioning at the High Priest’s house: “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” St John is alone of the four evangelists in using this word garden- today’s Passion opened with Jesus crossing the Kedron valley to go to the Mount of Olives, and immediately we read “There was a garden there, and he went into it with his disciples”. At the end of the Passion too, we are back in a garden- because John tells us “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried”. What are we to make of this? What is this garden?
I am sure your minds have immediately turned to the first time in the whole Bible when we hear about a garden- the ancient account of the creation of the world that we have in Genesis chapter 2 where the best way the Jews of those distant centuries could think of to describe the way things ought to be, the easy, harmonious relationship humanity ought to have with God, was to call it a garden. A place of beauty, order, calm. We read “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man whom he had formed”, (Gen 2 viii). Of course, this happy innocent state of being at peace and at one with God did not last, for as we know the garden was the place of the yielding of Adam and Eve to the blandishments of the Devil, of the initial and far-reaching disobedience of mankind, which resulted in exile from the garden. From now on, our human destiny was going to be a far more complicated affair, our relationship with God hard to discern and maintain, our basic sinfulness forever getting in the way – “therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden….to till the ground from which he was taken”. (Gen 3 xxiii).
All this has been discussed by the Holy Father in his latest book- I quote “John’s use of the word garden is an unmistakeable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here” (J of N II p149). The place of Adam’s disobedience will now be the place of the new Adam’s obedience – “even to accepting death, death on a cross”. The place where Adam and Eve are tempted and decide just to do their own thing and hang the consequences will be the place where Our Lord was, as it tells us in Hebrews “tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin” and where he prays to the Father “Not as I will, but as thou wilt….thy will be done” (Mt 26 xxxix, xlii). As Pope Benedict comments “It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history”. (ibid p150)
Of course in the garden of Eden everything depends on one thing: the Tree. What is this tree, and what is our attitude to it? Genesis speaks of “the tree of life….in the midst of the garden….the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2 ix). This tree is what everything revolves around in the drama of the Fall, everything depends on it, hangs on it- God says to Adam and Eve leave these things to God, accept that there are moral absolutes of good and evil, that it is not a question of “Does it feel good to me?” but “Is it good?”. Accept these limits to your freedom and all will be well. Do not interfere with the Tree! Do not start rearranging what is good and what is evil, leave well alone or we shall have chaos, a world where nothing is certain but everything, good and evil, just a matter of opinion. Well, we’ve got that!
And now in another garden there stands another Tree, a Tree on which everything depends, a Tree on which everything- everyone even- hangs in the tortured body of Our Lord Jesus himself. This Tree, the Cross, is the Tree of Life isn’t it, this is the place where good and evil are known, where good and evil meet for their ultimate combat. As we shall shortly be singing “This is the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world”. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, I think from the 9th century, “The Dream of the Rood”, one of the glories of the pre-Reformation devotional literature of this country, in which the Tree, the Cross, speaks. Here is a bit of it: “Men shifted me on their shoulders and set me on a hill….I saw the Lord of Mankind hasten with such courage to climb upon me. I dared not bow or break there, against my Lord’s wish, when I saw the surface of the earth tremble….Then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.” The poet shows us a Christ who is not coerced by soldiers, not forced onto the cross, but a Jesus who is serenely in control, “firm and unflinching” as he climbs onto the Tree as a warrior ready to do battle.
Dear friends, we are in that garden today, at this Solemn Liturgy we step, as at every Mass, outside of time and stand in eternity- this is the hour, this is the moment! We are in the garden, we are up against the reality of the garden, the reality of how we can be reconciled to God and live again in his friendship, that reality as we know is the Tree, the Cross! How we want to stay in this garden, to live our lives always in friendship with God, in the garden of his intimacy. And at the end of our earthly lives, when we too come to die, let us have our answer ready to that question put to Peter- “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” “Yes, I was there, I was there when they nailed him to the Tree”. Dear Jesus, help us! Help us to stay close to you in the garden, even if that means, as we know it does, that we have to stay close to the tree that is your Cross. Amen.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
Lent I 2011
Homily for Lent I 13 March 2011
Today’s Gospel is the well known story of Jesus being tempted in the desert in the period of forty days fasting and prayer during which he prepared himself for his public ministry. This event in Our Lord’s life is recorded in Mark – very briefly, just two verses- and in Luke, but Matthew describes it in his own special way, as we shall see. You remember that Matthew is writing his Gospel principally for Jewish Christians and uses many references and allusions to place Our Lord’s life and mission in the context of the Old Testament, often comparing Jesus to a second Moses, a second lawgiver and deliverer of his people, and so on. He expects his audience to pick up on all sorts of links to Genesis, to the creation of the world, so that we can understand that Jesus is bringing in a new creation, a new way of being human, a new Adam- as Newman’s hymn has it “a second Adam to the fight and to the victory came”. And in the first centuries of the Church the patristic writers knew this very well, as the mediaeval Gloss comments “that which Luke states seems more in accord with the facts; Matthew relates the temptations according to what was done to Adam”.
Let us see what this means. St Gregory the Great, who was pope at the turn of the seventh century, explains that the temptations of Jesus are an exact parallel to the temptation of Adam and Eve: it all begins with greed, with our carnal appetites, so the Devil begins with fruit in the garden of Eden, and here he starts with bread –“tell these stones to turn into loaves”; it goes on to pride, to taking God’s rightful place for ourselves- so the Tempter tells Eve that if she yields to temptation “you will be like gods” and tells Jesus that if he throws himself off the roof of the Temple, his divinity will be proved because God “will put you in his angels’ charge”; and then we have the appeal of the Devil to ambition, telling Adam and Eve that they “will know good and evil” for themselves, and offering Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. This threefold series of temptation is also an echo of the teachings of the rabbis, that looks back to Deuteronomy, where we shall see Our Lord finds the texts he quotes to answer the Devil, it is all in chapters 6-8. Chapter 6 verses iv-v contain the great Jewish statement of belief in the One God, that is known by its first word in Hebrew as the “Sh’ma”. This is the prayer that to this day Jewish people have on a little scroll in a container on the doorpost of their front doors to kiss as they come and go. It says: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”. Your heart, your soul, your might- and these correspond exactly to the three temptations of Jesus. For the early rabbis, these were the ways of sinning against this one great statement of belief. Heart- the impulses within us to good or evil; soul- life, or the voluntary giving up of life in martyrdom; might- wealth and property. In other words, the great temptation we all face is not to love God with a unified heart, to keep something back, and not to put our life or our livelihood on the line. Basically, what we see here, as always with the Devil and his tricks, is the temptation to take the easy way out, to fake it- faking is what the Devil likes us to do, he is after all known as the Father of Lies, whereas of course we are followers of the One who said “I am the Truth”, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. Satan says to Jesus, don’t go without anything, just magic up a meal from these stones, no one will know; do something spectacular that will be death-defying, like jumping off a building, but I’ll fix it so you don’t break your neck and die; and you want to inaugurate a kingdom, I’ll fix that too- you can have all the power you want, just go along with me from now on. Of course, Jesus was operating on a far different level from all this. He will indeed create food from an unlikely source, giving his followers through the centuries their spiritual food from the bread that becomes his Body at every mass; he will indeed perform a death-defying act, by his death on the Cross and his rising again, and he will indeed inaugurate a kingdom, a kingdom “not of this world”, the reign of peace and concord that we are all as Christians engaged in bringing into being in our daily lives.
There are important lessons for us here. The first is, that, as the patristic writers liked to point out, no one is so holy that they are safe from temptation- look, even Our Lord himself went through it. But at least that means he understands our temptations and deals kindly with us when we fall. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are”. (Heb 5 xv) The second is, that nowhere is so holy that we are safe from the Devil when we are there- St Rémi, bishop of Reims in the seventh century, says that the second temptation took place in the Temple to show us “that the Devil lies in wait for the faithful even in holy places”. Anyone who has been in a monastery or on a pilgrimage, or in any gathering of clergy, will know the truth of that. Ste Thérèse on her trip to Rome saw that very clearly. And the third and most important, is that we see how to combat temptation- how does Our Lord do it? He does it by using the Scriptures, by quoting the Bible at the Devil. He quotes from these chapters of Deuteronomy that we have mentioned earlier, that he obviously knows intimately, he has an answer for every cunning and cleverly worded suggestion that the Devil makes. Dear friends, we have begun our Lent, which is when we attempt in however small a way to go into the desert, that is to say, to put a bit of distance between ourselves and the normal routines of our daily lives- taking more time to say our prayers or to come to mass or the stations, giving up some small pleasures in food and drink, thinking more about those with needs greater than our own. Once we are in the desert, we must expect a visit from Satan. In fact, if he doesn’t come, that will be a very bad sign, it will mean he doesn’t think we are enough of a Christian to bother about! We must prepare ourselves for our visitor, the visitor from Hell, and I cannot think of a better way to be prepared than by our prayerful reflection every day on the words of Scripture, where God speaks to us if we will hear him. Let us make Our Lord’s words our own-“You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone”, and in this single-mindedness let us go forward into the desert of Lent, and may the angels come to us and look after us. Dear Jesus, never did we mean these words more: lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil! Amen.
Today’s Gospel is the well known story of Jesus being tempted in the desert in the period of forty days fasting and prayer during which he prepared himself for his public ministry. This event in Our Lord’s life is recorded in Mark – very briefly, just two verses- and in Luke, but Matthew describes it in his own special way, as we shall see. You remember that Matthew is writing his Gospel principally for Jewish Christians and uses many references and allusions to place Our Lord’s life and mission in the context of the Old Testament, often comparing Jesus to a second Moses, a second lawgiver and deliverer of his people, and so on. He expects his audience to pick up on all sorts of links to Genesis, to the creation of the world, so that we can understand that Jesus is bringing in a new creation, a new way of being human, a new Adam- as Newman’s hymn has it “a second Adam to the fight and to the victory came”. And in the first centuries of the Church the patristic writers knew this very well, as the mediaeval Gloss comments “that which Luke states seems more in accord with the facts; Matthew relates the temptations according to what was done to Adam”.
Let us see what this means. St Gregory the Great, who was pope at the turn of the seventh century, explains that the temptations of Jesus are an exact parallel to the temptation of Adam and Eve: it all begins with greed, with our carnal appetites, so the Devil begins with fruit in the garden of Eden, and here he starts with bread –“tell these stones to turn into loaves”; it goes on to pride, to taking God’s rightful place for ourselves- so the Tempter tells Eve that if she yields to temptation “you will be like gods” and tells Jesus that if he throws himself off the roof of the Temple, his divinity will be proved because God “will put you in his angels’ charge”; and then we have the appeal of the Devil to ambition, telling Adam and Eve that they “will know good and evil” for themselves, and offering Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. This threefold series of temptation is also an echo of the teachings of the rabbis, that looks back to Deuteronomy, where we shall see Our Lord finds the texts he quotes to answer the Devil, it is all in chapters 6-8. Chapter 6 verses iv-v contain the great Jewish statement of belief in the One God, that is known by its first word in Hebrew as the “Sh’ma”. This is the prayer that to this day Jewish people have on a little scroll in a container on the doorpost of their front doors to kiss as they come and go. It says: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”. Your heart, your soul, your might- and these correspond exactly to the three temptations of Jesus. For the early rabbis, these were the ways of sinning against this one great statement of belief. Heart- the impulses within us to good or evil; soul- life, or the voluntary giving up of life in martyrdom; might- wealth and property. In other words, the great temptation we all face is not to love God with a unified heart, to keep something back, and not to put our life or our livelihood on the line. Basically, what we see here, as always with the Devil and his tricks, is the temptation to take the easy way out, to fake it- faking is what the Devil likes us to do, he is after all known as the Father of Lies, whereas of course we are followers of the One who said “I am the Truth”, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. Satan says to Jesus, don’t go without anything, just magic up a meal from these stones, no one will know; do something spectacular that will be death-defying, like jumping off a building, but I’ll fix it so you don’t break your neck and die; and you want to inaugurate a kingdom, I’ll fix that too- you can have all the power you want, just go along with me from now on. Of course, Jesus was operating on a far different level from all this. He will indeed create food from an unlikely source, giving his followers through the centuries their spiritual food from the bread that becomes his Body at every mass; he will indeed perform a death-defying act, by his death on the Cross and his rising again, and he will indeed inaugurate a kingdom, a kingdom “not of this world”, the reign of peace and concord that we are all as Christians engaged in bringing into being in our daily lives.
There are important lessons for us here. The first is, that, as the patristic writers liked to point out, no one is so holy that they are safe from temptation- look, even Our Lord himself went through it. But at least that means he understands our temptations and deals kindly with us when we fall. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are”. (Heb 5 xv) The second is, that nowhere is so holy that we are safe from the Devil when we are there- St Rémi, bishop of Reims in the seventh century, says that the second temptation took place in the Temple to show us “that the Devil lies in wait for the faithful even in holy places”. Anyone who has been in a monastery or on a pilgrimage, or in any gathering of clergy, will know the truth of that. Ste Thérèse on her trip to Rome saw that very clearly. And the third and most important, is that we see how to combat temptation- how does Our Lord do it? He does it by using the Scriptures, by quoting the Bible at the Devil. He quotes from these chapters of Deuteronomy that we have mentioned earlier, that he obviously knows intimately, he has an answer for every cunning and cleverly worded suggestion that the Devil makes. Dear friends, we have begun our Lent, which is when we attempt in however small a way to go into the desert, that is to say, to put a bit of distance between ourselves and the normal routines of our daily lives- taking more time to say our prayers or to come to mass or the stations, giving up some small pleasures in food and drink, thinking more about those with needs greater than our own. Once we are in the desert, we must expect a visit from Satan. In fact, if he doesn’t come, that will be a very bad sign, it will mean he doesn’t think we are enough of a Christian to bother about! We must prepare ourselves for our visitor, the visitor from Hell, and I cannot think of a better way to be prepared than by our prayerful reflection every day on the words of Scripture, where God speaks to us if we will hear him. Let us make Our Lord’s words our own-“You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone”, and in this single-mindedness let us go forward into the desert of Lent, and may the angels come to us and look after us. Dear Jesus, never did we mean these words more: lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil! Amen.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Seventh Sunday in Ordinary time 20 February 2011
Homily for Seventh Sunday of the Year 20 February 2011
Today we continue our way through the compendium of Jesus’s teachings that we call the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s Gospel comes at the end of a passage in which Our Lord is explaining that the commandments of the Jewish law, good as they stand of course, have got to be considered and followed through in all their implications. So just before todays’ Gospel we have the bit about “you know ‘you shall not kill’ but I say ‘don’t get angry either’” and “you know it says ‘you shall not commit adultery’ but I say ‘if you are lusting after a woman, that’s just as bad’”. In other words, what we have here is Jesus saying that sin is not just about our actions- killing someone or sleeping with them- but about what is going on in our minds, because that is where all sin starts, with our unguarded, unchecked thoughts. Once we let all sorts of wrong thoughts romp around in our minds, we are bringing acting those thoughts out all the closer! So be careful what you think about! And so to today’s Gospel, which looks at first glance as if it is about that very common human failing, the desire for retaliation- getting our own back on the people who do us wrong- which seems such a natural reaction in us.
Jesus reminds us his hearers that the Jewish law- we find it in Deuteronomy 19- states “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. How barbaric and bloodthirsty that sounds! In fact this was really an attempt by the Jews to bring a sense of balance to the seeking of revenge; this idea of being satisfied with like for like was brought in, in common with many other law codes of the ancient world, to bring a halt to the momentum of revenge, to vendettas that could go on and on. To begin with there was a desire for endless revenge: you remember how in Genesis this growth in violence so saddens God that he thinks of destroying mankind once and for all in the flood. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, gloats at having killed a man for striking him and wants to go on and on: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold”. (Gen 4 xxiv). The Jews even before Our Lord’s time had moved on from “an eye for an eye” to what is called the Silver Rule, of Rabbi Hillel, which was basically “don’t do anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want them to do to you”, which effectively ruled out killing them or knocking their eye out. We actually find this in the Bible too, in the book of Tobit, which was written probably about 200 years before Our Lord’s time. Tobit is sending his son Tobias off on a mission and gives him a lot of good advice, including this: “And what you hate, do not do to anyone” (Tob 4 xv). That is good advice of course, but still is a negative thing, it’s about what not to do. Our Lord is going to improve on this in two further steps. There is the so-called Golden Rule, coming up a bit later on in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7 xii), something much more positive! And then here, the greatest refinement of all in our way of dealing with our fellow human beings when they mess us around: “But I say this to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.
Why have we got to do this annoying and unnatural thing? Well, the reason is simply this: we are created in the first place in the image and likeness of God and we have got to become – this is the essence of the Christian life we are all trying to lead- we have got to become bit by bit more like God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. And that means we can’t hate or punish anybody, because those are not things that God does. We sometimes wish he did, we’d quite like to see Mrs So-and-so next door get struck by lightning, after all, she deserves it the way she goes on, and surely God must hate that mob who burnt a church down the other day…. But God is the Creator of all humanity and loves all of his creation, loves all of us human beings unconditionally, indeed we can say loves us indiscriminately. How does Our Lord put it? “He causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike”.
And that is a huge problem for us, because it offends us- in fact I think we often experience this impartiality of God as a kind of injustice. We want God to be on our side as indeed he is, but the thing is, that doesn’t stop him being on other people’s side too, because they, whoever they are, are also his children, whether they know it or like it or accept it or not. The Jews, even though in their first centuries they were often tempted to talk about God as their very own, the God of Israel and so on, even they were aware- if only fleetingly sometimes- that there was more to God than that, that he was everybody’s God. There is an early hint of this when Joshua is planning his great attack on Jericho as part of the conquest of the Promised Land. He has a vision of God, who appears to him as a man holding a drawn sword. As the Jerusalem Bible has it: “And Joshua walked towards him and said to him ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied ‘On neither side’. ” (Josh 5 xiv) There you have it spelt out: ‘On neither side’. The readings we have had during this week from the Old Testament have said the same thing: we had Deuteronomy the other day, where God says “You must be impartial” (Deut 1 xvii NJB) and today in Leviticus “You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart….you must not exact vengeance nor must you bear a grudge”.
When it comes to getting to grips with the impartiality of God, this God who sends his rain on everybody regardless, we have to admit we baulk at it. But there it is for us in Scripture in the clearest terms- whose side is God on? “On neither side”. We must try as we grow in our Christian life, as we grow into the person God wants us to be, that person with godlike qualities, that person who has something of the divine about him or her, to acquire something of this impartiality, for we have as our aim “to be perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect”. Dear Jesus, help us to practise in our own lives that impartiality of our heavenly Father, who loves all his creatures with even-handed love; take from our hearts the grudges that we nurture there, the prejudices that form so easily and firmly in our minds; give us instead the desire to be perfect even as our heavenly father is perfect. Amen.
Today we continue our way through the compendium of Jesus’s teachings that we call the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s Gospel comes at the end of a passage in which Our Lord is explaining that the commandments of the Jewish law, good as they stand of course, have got to be considered and followed through in all their implications. So just before todays’ Gospel we have the bit about “you know ‘you shall not kill’ but I say ‘don’t get angry either’” and “you know it says ‘you shall not commit adultery’ but I say ‘if you are lusting after a woman, that’s just as bad’”. In other words, what we have here is Jesus saying that sin is not just about our actions- killing someone or sleeping with them- but about what is going on in our minds, because that is where all sin starts, with our unguarded, unchecked thoughts. Once we let all sorts of wrong thoughts romp around in our minds, we are bringing acting those thoughts out all the closer! So be careful what you think about! And so to today’s Gospel, which looks at first glance as if it is about that very common human failing, the desire for retaliation- getting our own back on the people who do us wrong- which seems such a natural reaction in us.
Jesus reminds us his hearers that the Jewish law- we find it in Deuteronomy 19- states “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. How barbaric and bloodthirsty that sounds! In fact this was really an attempt by the Jews to bring a sense of balance to the seeking of revenge; this idea of being satisfied with like for like was brought in, in common with many other law codes of the ancient world, to bring a halt to the momentum of revenge, to vendettas that could go on and on. To begin with there was a desire for endless revenge: you remember how in Genesis this growth in violence so saddens God that he thinks of destroying mankind once and for all in the flood. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, gloats at having killed a man for striking him and wants to go on and on: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold”. (Gen 4 xxiv). The Jews even before Our Lord’s time had moved on from “an eye for an eye” to what is called the Silver Rule, of Rabbi Hillel, which was basically “don’t do anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want them to do to you”, which effectively ruled out killing them or knocking their eye out. We actually find this in the Bible too, in the book of Tobit, which was written probably about 200 years before Our Lord’s time. Tobit is sending his son Tobias off on a mission and gives him a lot of good advice, including this: “And what you hate, do not do to anyone” (Tob 4 xv). That is good advice of course, but still is a negative thing, it’s about what not to do. Our Lord is going to improve on this in two further steps. There is the so-called Golden Rule, coming up a bit later on in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7 xii), something much more positive! And then here, the greatest refinement of all in our way of dealing with our fellow human beings when they mess us around: “But I say this to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.
Why have we got to do this annoying and unnatural thing? Well, the reason is simply this: we are created in the first place in the image and likeness of God and we have got to become – this is the essence of the Christian life we are all trying to lead- we have got to become bit by bit more like God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. And that means we can’t hate or punish anybody, because those are not things that God does. We sometimes wish he did, we’d quite like to see Mrs So-and-so next door get struck by lightning, after all, she deserves it the way she goes on, and surely God must hate that mob who burnt a church down the other day…. But God is the Creator of all humanity and loves all of his creation, loves all of us human beings unconditionally, indeed we can say loves us indiscriminately. How does Our Lord put it? “He causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike”.
And that is a huge problem for us, because it offends us- in fact I think we often experience this impartiality of God as a kind of injustice. We want God to be on our side as indeed he is, but the thing is, that doesn’t stop him being on other people’s side too, because they, whoever they are, are also his children, whether they know it or like it or accept it or not. The Jews, even though in their first centuries they were often tempted to talk about God as their very own, the God of Israel and so on, even they were aware- if only fleetingly sometimes- that there was more to God than that, that he was everybody’s God. There is an early hint of this when Joshua is planning his great attack on Jericho as part of the conquest of the Promised Land. He has a vision of God, who appears to him as a man holding a drawn sword. As the Jerusalem Bible has it: “And Joshua walked towards him and said to him ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied ‘On neither side’. ” (Josh 5 xiv) There you have it spelt out: ‘On neither side’. The readings we have had during this week from the Old Testament have said the same thing: we had Deuteronomy the other day, where God says “You must be impartial” (Deut 1 xvii NJB) and today in Leviticus “You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart….you must not exact vengeance nor must you bear a grudge”.
When it comes to getting to grips with the impartiality of God, this God who sends his rain on everybody regardless, we have to admit we baulk at it. But there it is for us in Scripture in the clearest terms- whose side is God on? “On neither side”. We must try as we grow in our Christian life, as we grow into the person God wants us to be, that person with godlike qualities, that person who has something of the divine about him or her, to acquire something of this impartiality, for we have as our aim “to be perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect”. Dear Jesus, help us to practise in our own lives that impartiality of our heavenly Father, who loves all his creatures with even-handed love; take from our hearts the grudges that we nurture there, the prejudices that form so easily and firmly in our minds; give us instead the desire to be perfect even as our heavenly father is perfect. Amen.
S
Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 30 January 2011
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.
Sunday, 26 December 2010
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.
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, 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.
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