Homily for Fifth Sunday in Lent 21 March 2010
This Gospel we have just heard is one of the most moving of all the stories of Jesus, and yet it may surprise you to know that for at least three hundred years it was not officially in the Gospels at all, and it exists in none of the most ancient manuscripts. This is not to say that it didn’t exist, but it had an existence of its own, in a sort of free-fall; it was well known but was outside the official Scriptures of the Church. We know that Christians were aware of this story because already in the early 2nd century a Bishop, Papias, who was the first person to start researching into the background of the gospels and letters that would eventually come to be recognised as what we now call the New Testament, writes that, as well as the four Gospels, there is “another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord” and there are references to it in the writings of Syrian Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It was really only thanks to St Ambrose and St Augustine that this wonderful story of Our Lord’s forbearance and gentleness was finally inserted by St Jerome into St John’s Gospel, where we find it today. Perhaps it seemed a good place to add it, because only a few verses later on in this same chapter John reports Jesus as saying (in verse 15) “You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one” and later (in verse 46) Jesus challenges the Pharisees by asking them “Which of you convicts me of sin?”
Why were those first Christians so uneasy about this story that they hesitated to include it in the Gospels? Well, I think it was paradoxically for the very same reason that we like it so much: it showed Our Lord being very lenient with someone accused of serious sexual sin. In the first centuries of the Church (a fact often overlooked by those who say we must go back to the ways of the primitive Church, by the way) it was regarded as extremely serious for believers to fall back into the ways of sin and there were many harsh and often public penances involved before such a person could hope to be accepted again into the Christian community. But as time progressed and the sacrament of Confession became better understood and more widely and frequently practised, a more compassionate approach took hold in the Church, an approach that took into account our human nature and all its weaknesses, an approach that understood that Our Lord was, in his unconditional love, always ready to give us a second chance- a second, a third, a hundredth chance. And so in the fullness of time this beautiful story came into its own.
Let us look at our Gospel reading a bit more closely. What is the motivation of the accusers who have dragged this unfortunate woman before Our Lord? First of all, it takes two to tango, doesn’t it, so where is the man who had slept with her? Moses in fact didn’t just say the woman involved had to be stoned, but the man too – he has, typically I hear you say, got off scot free, the accusers don’t seem to be bothered about him. They have caught the woman, and that is enough- but do they really care about justice being done? So often behind all the bluster of outraged so-called good and upright citizens when they are complaining loudly about the misdeeds of their neighbours, and demanding that something must be done, lies a whole mixture of dubious motives. Here they are really only interested in baiting Jesus- what will he say? Will they be able to use whatever he comes out with as ammunition against him with the authorities? But Jesus is silent, he just sits there doodling in the sand. The Fathers of the ancient Church compared this to that verse in Isaiah where God delays his judgement of Israel, saying “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself…” (Is 42:14) and some imagined that he was writing down the sins or perhaps the names of the accusers, because the prophet Jeremiah says “those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth”. (Jer 17:13) The eagerly expected condemnation does not come, and famously Our Lord- perhaps with a half-smile on his lips, who knows?- suggests that if there is anyone there who has never done anything wrong, then perhaps they should be the one to cast the first stone, and so the crowd in some embarrassment we can imagine and possibly with a certain reluctance begins to melt away.
And now comes what is for me the most important point in the story- “Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained standing there”. St Augustine loved this bit, he says “now there were only two: the wretched woman and the merciful one- misera et misericordia” That is what we have to bear in mind: when it will really matter, when we come to the end of our life, there will only be two people- me and Jesus. All the people who fill my life won’t be there any more, my loved ones won’t be around, and neither will be all the people who clutter up my life with their criticisms, their disapproval, their gossiping about me, their opinions about me, right or wrong! There will only be me and Jesus, no one else – the miserable sinner meeting the personification of the Divine Mercy. And that is the encounter we should be preparing for, especially in these last days of Lent that we now enter on, when we have so many opportunities for devotion and for the sacraments. How we hope and pray that we will find Our Lord in this loving mood of gentleness, that he will just be silent in front of all our misdoings, the goings on of our youth and all the sexual nonsense that so easily comes to the forefront of our minds and so easily sidetracks us and clouds our vision- that finally he will soothe our anguish –for we will be only too keenly aware of what we have got up to, we won’t need a crowd of accusers, our conscience will be doing a grand job on its own – he will look up at us and please God we will hear those words of all-comprehending mercy “Neither do I condemn you”. He will say those words, we hope, because he will look into our hearts and see what it was that was our true motivation in life, however obscured from time to time it may have been. Our present Holy Father in a book on death he wrote twenty years ago which I hope to share with you some insights from on Good Friday, says that the only question worth asking of ourselves will be, what did I give people? When I spoke to them, in my dealings with them, what did I give them? The answer that Pope Benedict thinks is the only answer, is Hope. Not condemnation, but hope. The Gospels show us Our Lord at work, doing precisely that- giving people hope, in whatever situation they might be, and most clearly of all, he gives hope in his response to the woman in today’s reading. Let us be people who offer each other as well as the sign of peace at this Mass, a thousand signs of hope in our daily converse with each other, hope, not condemnation, but hope. And dear Jesus, when the day comes when we stand together you and I alone may each one of us hear you say “Neither do I condemn you” as you look up and rest your loving gaze upon us your wayward friends. Say to us “Neither do I condemn you!” Amen.
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Baptism of the Lord 10 Jan 2010
Homily for the Baptism of the Lord 10 January 2010 (Year C)
Today the Church asks us to recall the moment when Our Lord came to John the Baptist and asked him for baptism, an event that is recorded by all the four evangelists, although, typically, each of them describes it a bit differently. St Mark has John the Baptist saying “I will baptise you with water but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit” and in St John’s Gospel John the Baptist has had a vision- he says “he who sent me to baptise with water said to me….”this is he who baptises with the Holy Spirit”. But St Matthew and St Luke both add something: in Matthew’s account, John the Baptist says “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” and in today’s reading also this is what Luke has John the Baptist saying- “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. What is all this about fire, I wonder?
First of all, we need to remind ourselves of how the writers of the Gospels saw fire- it is not, as we might expect, a symbol of punishment, fire as a destructive force, but a symbol of what fire can do that is positive, it is a symbol of refining, of purification. You know the sort of thing, when metals are heated up and all the dross is burnt off and falls away and only the pure metal is left. That is the sense in which Our Lord talks about fire himself- you remember perhaps that later in Luke’s Gospel (in chapter 12) Jesus says “I came to cast fire on the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” He means, how I wish that the human race was being purified even now! Interestingly, when Jesus says this, he goes on immediately to add “I have a baptism to be baptised with and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” This fire, this purifying, this refining, is something the human race stands in urgent need of, and until we have been refined in some way – as if by fire- then we are apparently holding back the work of the Lord, that is what this text means.
So, as St Luke tells us this evening, Jesus is coming to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. For me, I make sense of this by remembering that in Genesis we are told that God created human beings in his image and likeness. St Thomas says, we are created in the image of God because we have two vital attributes: we have our brains, we can think things out- what we call Reason- and we have the ability to make choices, to choose to do something or not to, what we call in theology Free Will. We can think, and we are free agents, we can do what we like. But how- here is the question- do we achieve the likeness of God? How do we become like God, how do we acquire some reflections of the divine nature in our own lives? Here I turn to that great theologian of the second century, St Irenaeus, the Greek bishop of Lyon in central France. He says we are born in the image, but we have to grow into the likeness. I look at myself when I examine my conscience at the end of the day, and when I prepare for confession, and I have to admit I am not much like God, there is very little in my life that can bear any comparison with the divine nature, which as we know is all about loving and forgiving, giving and not counting the cost. We are all like that aren’t we- all far from achieving this all important likeness to God. So St Irenaeus says acquiring this likeness, or our salvation in other words, is a process. We engage in the process of becoming more like God every day, and we do this by the simple process of the decisions we make, which will either be good decisions, decisions for the good, or bad decisions based on our own selfish motives. And for St Irenaeus, there is a momentum about this, in that the more good decisions we make, the more good decisions we will find ourselves able to make, just as the more bad decisions we make, the faster we will go down the road of our own self-destruction.
How does this fit into the whole idea of Baptism, the baptism by the Holy Spirit and by fire? Well, as we know, in Baptism we are brought into the life of Christ, we become members of his Church and as such caught up for ever in an intimate relation with him as his brothers and sisters, and that close union with him is achieved and maintained by the gift in our Baptism of the Holy Spirit, a gift that is later strengthened and brought to maturity in us by the further sacrament of Confirmation. But the gift of the Holy Spirit to us is a gift that needs activating- for the Holy Spirit to be really effective in our lives, we need to co-operate with Him, listening to his prompting in our conscience and letting nothing stand in the way of those holy desires that he arouses in our hearts. And I have come to think that this co-operation with the Holy Spirit in our lives comes about chiefly in the way we respond to the trails that come to us, the various adversities and troubles, the injustices and sufferings that come to all of us sooner or later. At the very least, these give the Holy Spirit in us a kick start! This for me is the fire- these bad things that happen to us can of course if we let them just damage us and embitter or enrage us, diminish us in some permanent way, so that we become people who can never forget what has happened to us, can never get over whatever it is. Or- and this is the challenge I know- we can let these calamities refine us, we can come out the other side of them- hurt yes, but having grown through the hurt into kinder, more thoughtful, more reflective people, more ready perhaps to sympathise with the troubles of others, less eager to condemn, more willing to forgive. That is the refining fire- suffering that suddenly puts everything in our lives into sharp perspective, that enables us to see the wood for the trees, to understand with a new clarity what really matters and what doesn’t. Our response to the fire when it comes to us will be our great chance to lean more completely on God, and in so doing to grow that bit closer to the likeness of God, to have something more of the divine in our lives than before. No wonder then that Jesus says he has come to cast fire on the earth – to set up the whole process of the refining of humanity- and no wonder he is impatient for this fire, this process, to get really under way- for until humanity is refined and purified of all its selfish ways his Kingdom is likely to be held up in its expansion or at least proceed at a slower pace than it should. How we need that fire! Yesterday Fr Chris reminded me of what that great Spanish mystic St John of the Cross said: “we are all logs on the fire”. May we let the fire do its work in us, let us allow ourselves to be purified, to be refined, to develop in our lives an ever greater likeness to Our Lord. I end with one of the prayers for Pentecost- “May that fire which hovered over the disciples in tongues of flame burn out all evil from our hearts and make them glow with pure light” for Our Lord has a baptism to be baptised with and we long for it be accomplished. Amen.
Today the Church asks us to recall the moment when Our Lord came to John the Baptist and asked him for baptism, an event that is recorded by all the four evangelists, although, typically, each of them describes it a bit differently. St Mark has John the Baptist saying “I will baptise you with water but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit” and in St John’s Gospel John the Baptist has had a vision- he says “he who sent me to baptise with water said to me….”this is he who baptises with the Holy Spirit”. But St Matthew and St Luke both add something: in Matthew’s account, John the Baptist says “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” and in today’s reading also this is what Luke has John the Baptist saying- “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. What is all this about fire, I wonder?
First of all, we need to remind ourselves of how the writers of the Gospels saw fire- it is not, as we might expect, a symbol of punishment, fire as a destructive force, but a symbol of what fire can do that is positive, it is a symbol of refining, of purification. You know the sort of thing, when metals are heated up and all the dross is burnt off and falls away and only the pure metal is left. That is the sense in which Our Lord talks about fire himself- you remember perhaps that later in Luke’s Gospel (in chapter 12) Jesus says “I came to cast fire on the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” He means, how I wish that the human race was being purified even now! Interestingly, when Jesus says this, he goes on immediately to add “I have a baptism to be baptised with and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” This fire, this purifying, this refining, is something the human race stands in urgent need of, and until we have been refined in some way – as if by fire- then we are apparently holding back the work of the Lord, that is what this text means.
So, as St Luke tells us this evening, Jesus is coming to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. For me, I make sense of this by remembering that in Genesis we are told that God created human beings in his image and likeness. St Thomas says, we are created in the image of God because we have two vital attributes: we have our brains, we can think things out- what we call Reason- and we have the ability to make choices, to choose to do something or not to, what we call in theology Free Will. We can think, and we are free agents, we can do what we like. But how- here is the question- do we achieve the likeness of God? How do we become like God, how do we acquire some reflections of the divine nature in our own lives? Here I turn to that great theologian of the second century, St Irenaeus, the Greek bishop of Lyon in central France. He says we are born in the image, but we have to grow into the likeness. I look at myself when I examine my conscience at the end of the day, and when I prepare for confession, and I have to admit I am not much like God, there is very little in my life that can bear any comparison with the divine nature, which as we know is all about loving and forgiving, giving and not counting the cost. We are all like that aren’t we- all far from achieving this all important likeness to God. So St Irenaeus says acquiring this likeness, or our salvation in other words, is a process. We engage in the process of becoming more like God every day, and we do this by the simple process of the decisions we make, which will either be good decisions, decisions for the good, or bad decisions based on our own selfish motives. And for St Irenaeus, there is a momentum about this, in that the more good decisions we make, the more good decisions we will find ourselves able to make, just as the more bad decisions we make, the faster we will go down the road of our own self-destruction.
How does this fit into the whole idea of Baptism, the baptism by the Holy Spirit and by fire? Well, as we know, in Baptism we are brought into the life of Christ, we become members of his Church and as such caught up for ever in an intimate relation with him as his brothers and sisters, and that close union with him is achieved and maintained by the gift in our Baptism of the Holy Spirit, a gift that is later strengthened and brought to maturity in us by the further sacrament of Confirmation. But the gift of the Holy Spirit to us is a gift that needs activating- for the Holy Spirit to be really effective in our lives, we need to co-operate with Him, listening to his prompting in our conscience and letting nothing stand in the way of those holy desires that he arouses in our hearts. And I have come to think that this co-operation with the Holy Spirit in our lives comes about chiefly in the way we respond to the trails that come to us, the various adversities and troubles, the injustices and sufferings that come to all of us sooner or later. At the very least, these give the Holy Spirit in us a kick start! This for me is the fire- these bad things that happen to us can of course if we let them just damage us and embitter or enrage us, diminish us in some permanent way, so that we become people who can never forget what has happened to us, can never get over whatever it is. Or- and this is the challenge I know- we can let these calamities refine us, we can come out the other side of them- hurt yes, but having grown through the hurt into kinder, more thoughtful, more reflective people, more ready perhaps to sympathise with the troubles of others, less eager to condemn, more willing to forgive. That is the refining fire- suffering that suddenly puts everything in our lives into sharp perspective, that enables us to see the wood for the trees, to understand with a new clarity what really matters and what doesn’t. Our response to the fire when it comes to us will be our great chance to lean more completely on God, and in so doing to grow that bit closer to the likeness of God, to have something more of the divine in our lives than before. No wonder then that Jesus says he has come to cast fire on the earth – to set up the whole process of the refining of humanity- and no wonder he is impatient for this fire, this process, to get really under way- for until humanity is refined and purified of all its selfish ways his Kingdom is likely to be held up in its expansion or at least proceed at a slower pace than it should. How we need that fire! Yesterday Fr Chris reminded me of what that great Spanish mystic St John of the Cross said: “we are all logs on the fire”. May we let the fire do its work in us, let us allow ourselves to be purified, to be refined, to develop in our lives an ever greater likeness to Our Lord. I end with one of the prayers for Pentecost- “May that fire which hovered over the disciples in tongues of flame burn out all evil from our hearts and make them glow with pure light” for Our Lord has a baptism to be baptised with and we long for it be accomplished. Amen.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Immaculate Conception chez the Norbertines
Homily for the Immaculate Conception 8 December 2009
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate Chelmsford
I must say I always find the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady a difficult subject to explain – am I alone in this? As Catholics we understand the special nature of Our Lady almost instinctively, it is all part of the great reverence in which we hold her, but how to put this into words! The first thing we have to remind ourselves of, is that although only formally defined as a dogma of the Church in the 19th century, the idea that Our Lady was somehow always preserved by God from sin to fit her for her role as the one who would bear Divinity in her womb, and bring the Second Person of the Trinity into the world, the Theotokos, was present, at least implicitly, in the thought of the Fathers of the Church from the first centuries. Perhaps the earliest reference to this belief we have is in the “Letter to the Priests and Deacons of Achaia” – this may or may not be late 1st century, scholars worry about these things, but already this ancient document claims that God willed that “from an undefiled Virgin should be born the perfect man.” To move on to the fourth century: as your dear Community has a devotion to your holy father St Augustine, may I remind you of some lines of his? “How in fact could we know” he asks “the degree of grace given to her to conquer sin in every way, for she who was worthy to conceive and bring forth him who certainly never sinned?”
The Bible affords us examples of people who will have a special mission in life being prepared for it already at the moment of conception or in the womb. We think straightaway of the prophet Jeremiah, who tells us that “the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.’” (Jer 1:4-5) And of course we have the Psalmist saying “Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb….thou knowest me right well, my frame was not hidden from thee when I was being made in secret.” (Ps 139:13-15) And then there is John the Baptist, of whom the Angel Gabriel said “he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” (Lk 1:15) The monk of Canterbury, Eadmer, writing in the 11th century, friend and biographer of St Anselm, was one of the first to compose a treatise on the Immaculate Conception – St Anselm of course introduced this very feast into the calendar of England and Normandy; Eadmer calls Our Lady “the gentlest cradle of the only Son of Almighty God”, and again “the palace where the Christ in person would assume human nature” and having reminded us of this text about John the Baptist asks “who would dare say that the Virgin….was deprived at the very instant of her conception of the grace and right of the Holy Spirit?” We would be here all night if I went through all the sources- I just have three more writers to quote! That great Oratorian Cardinal de Bérulle in the 16th century explains the Immaculate Conception in this way: he says “God exists and acts in her more than she does herself” “She has no thought but by his grace, no movement but by his Spirit, no action but by his love”. In a similar way, St Maximilian Kolbe writing in the 1930s says “there was not found in her the least distancing of herself from the will of God”. To come right up to our own times, the French theologian and new auxiliary bishop of Lyon, Mgr Patrick Le Gall, when considering the Immaculate Conception, homes in on the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians: what St Paul is saying here of the destiny of all Christians, is particularly true of Mary: he says God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him”. (Eph 1:4) Mgr Le Gall says that this destiny of Our Lady, which we call the Immaculate Conception, makes us admire the power of the redemption that Christ achieves in one human being: “capable….of opening a space of fantastic freedom to recognise and respond to the call of God in all its richness”.
And now I come to what I think! Well, the explanation I like best, anyway. I got it from the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For me, as for him, the way in to this dogma of the Immaculate Conception lies in approaching it using the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Now don’t go to sleep, this is easy to understand I assure you! Plato had this idea that the world around us, and everything that we can see with our senses, is not real. Things in this world are in a constant state of flux, everything is changing all the time, the best idea we can get of anything using our senses is just a snapshot of the state it’s in right now. Plants are forever putting forth new leaves and shoots, flowers come into bud, open and fade – as the French say, “tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse”. It is only with the mind that we can really understand things, in the mind that we can hold the idea, what Plato calls the “form” of a thing, the idea of a thing in its essence, in its perfection, in its accuracy. No flower in any of its stages will be as perfect as the picture of what a flower should be that we have in our mind’s eye. Now when all these platonic ways of thinking were taken up by the first Christian thinkers- no surprise that they were, it was how they had been educated –you can see how useful they are as a way of thinking about our Christian destiny. Which is the real me? The picture of me at 20 with raven hair, the one of me in my forties in my Oxford gown? The one of me naked on a hearth rug (age 9 months I hasten to add! I’m not speaking of any recent indiscretion!) the ageing deacon in his late prime you see before you? Plato would say none of them are the real me, because the real James cannot be seen by the naked eye- the real James exists only in the mind of God. Now God, we can say, has in his creating of us as individuals, in his bringing of each one of us into the world, a form of us in his mind, an idea- the ideal version of me, that is my ultimate destiny, the me that God wants me to become. This is what St Paul means when in Sunday’s reading from his Letter to the Philippians he speaks of us reaching “the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us”, the version of ourselves that is “pure and blameless”. (Phil 1:10-11) And we, insofar as we co-operate with God’s grace or not, embark in our Christian living on the process of trying to align our version of ourselves, the work that is always in progress in our souls, with this perfect version of us that is in God’s mind, that is God’s will for me, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ” as St Paul has it. Alas, for most of us, poor frail human beings that we are, so easily deluded and derailed, the version of ourselves that we bring to our deathbeds is still some way off from the ideal of us that is in God’s mind! The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that there will at least be some points of resemblance between the two! Now to return finally to Our Lady- she is the exception of course. She is the one human being who fits the picture completely, with no discrepancies- as Fulton Sheen says “there is a perfect conformity between what he wanted her to be and what she is”. “Most of us” he says “are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign….the Ideal that God had of her, that she is.” She is the one who is “pure and blameless”, “holy and blameless.”
Dear friends, when St Bernadette saw Our Lady in the grotto, she asked her who she was. “I am the Immaculate Conception” came the astounding reply. What Our Lady is giving us in these words is the explanation, the key, to her whole existence: conceived, brought into being by God as each one of us is, a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and yet immaculate- so at one with God and his will for her that she was brimful of his sanctifying grace, with no room for the slightest iota of sin, and could therefore only be what he had always had in mind for her to be. The explanation, in fact, of every Christian destiny, the ultimate aspiration of every human being: “holy and blameless before him”,as St Paul says. May grace be given to us all this evening to co-operate ever more readily with God, so that the gap between who we are and who he wants us to be narrows and goes on diminishing. May Our Lady aid us by her prayers, so that we come ever closer to fulfilling the high hopes that Our Heavenly Father has of each one of us, so that on the Last Day we too may appear in our humbler turn “holy and blameless before him”, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ”. Amen.
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate Chelmsford
I must say I always find the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady a difficult subject to explain – am I alone in this? As Catholics we understand the special nature of Our Lady almost instinctively, it is all part of the great reverence in which we hold her, but how to put this into words! The first thing we have to remind ourselves of, is that although only formally defined as a dogma of the Church in the 19th century, the idea that Our Lady was somehow always preserved by God from sin to fit her for her role as the one who would bear Divinity in her womb, and bring the Second Person of the Trinity into the world, the Theotokos, was present, at least implicitly, in the thought of the Fathers of the Church from the first centuries. Perhaps the earliest reference to this belief we have is in the “Letter to the Priests and Deacons of Achaia” – this may or may not be late 1st century, scholars worry about these things, but already this ancient document claims that God willed that “from an undefiled Virgin should be born the perfect man.” To move on to the fourth century: as your dear Community has a devotion to your holy father St Augustine, may I remind you of some lines of his? “How in fact could we know” he asks “the degree of grace given to her to conquer sin in every way, for she who was worthy to conceive and bring forth him who certainly never sinned?”
The Bible affords us examples of people who will have a special mission in life being prepared for it already at the moment of conception or in the womb. We think straightaway of the prophet Jeremiah, who tells us that “the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.’” (Jer 1:4-5) And of course we have the Psalmist saying “Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb….thou knowest me right well, my frame was not hidden from thee when I was being made in secret.” (Ps 139:13-15) And then there is John the Baptist, of whom the Angel Gabriel said “he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” (Lk 1:15) The monk of Canterbury, Eadmer, writing in the 11th century, friend and biographer of St Anselm, was one of the first to compose a treatise on the Immaculate Conception – St Anselm of course introduced this very feast into the calendar of England and Normandy; Eadmer calls Our Lady “the gentlest cradle of the only Son of Almighty God”, and again “the palace where the Christ in person would assume human nature” and having reminded us of this text about John the Baptist asks “who would dare say that the Virgin….was deprived at the very instant of her conception of the grace and right of the Holy Spirit?” We would be here all night if I went through all the sources- I just have three more writers to quote! That great Oratorian Cardinal de Bérulle in the 16th century explains the Immaculate Conception in this way: he says “God exists and acts in her more than she does herself” “She has no thought but by his grace, no movement but by his Spirit, no action but by his love”. In a similar way, St Maximilian Kolbe writing in the 1930s says “there was not found in her the least distancing of herself from the will of God”. To come right up to our own times, the French theologian and new auxiliary bishop of Lyon, Mgr Patrick Le Gall, when considering the Immaculate Conception, homes in on the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians: what St Paul is saying here of the destiny of all Christians, is particularly true of Mary: he says God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him”. (Eph 1:4) Mgr Le Gall says that this destiny of Our Lady, which we call the Immaculate Conception, makes us admire the power of the redemption that Christ achieves in one human being: “capable….of opening a space of fantastic freedom to recognise and respond to the call of God in all its richness”.
And now I come to what I think! Well, the explanation I like best, anyway. I got it from the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For me, as for him, the way in to this dogma of the Immaculate Conception lies in approaching it using the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Now don’t go to sleep, this is easy to understand I assure you! Plato had this idea that the world around us, and everything that we can see with our senses, is not real. Things in this world are in a constant state of flux, everything is changing all the time, the best idea we can get of anything using our senses is just a snapshot of the state it’s in right now. Plants are forever putting forth new leaves and shoots, flowers come into bud, open and fade – as the French say, “tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse”. It is only with the mind that we can really understand things, in the mind that we can hold the idea, what Plato calls the “form” of a thing, the idea of a thing in its essence, in its perfection, in its accuracy. No flower in any of its stages will be as perfect as the picture of what a flower should be that we have in our mind’s eye. Now when all these platonic ways of thinking were taken up by the first Christian thinkers- no surprise that they were, it was how they had been educated –you can see how useful they are as a way of thinking about our Christian destiny. Which is the real me? The picture of me at 20 with raven hair, the one of me in my forties in my Oxford gown? The one of me naked on a hearth rug (age 9 months I hasten to add! I’m not speaking of any recent indiscretion!) the ageing deacon in his late prime you see before you? Plato would say none of them are the real me, because the real James cannot be seen by the naked eye- the real James exists only in the mind of God. Now God, we can say, has in his creating of us as individuals, in his bringing of each one of us into the world, a form of us in his mind, an idea- the ideal version of me, that is my ultimate destiny, the me that God wants me to become. This is what St Paul means when in Sunday’s reading from his Letter to the Philippians he speaks of us reaching “the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us”, the version of ourselves that is “pure and blameless”. (Phil 1:10-11) And we, insofar as we co-operate with God’s grace or not, embark in our Christian living on the process of trying to align our version of ourselves, the work that is always in progress in our souls, with this perfect version of us that is in God’s mind, that is God’s will for me, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ” as St Paul has it. Alas, for most of us, poor frail human beings that we are, so easily deluded and derailed, the version of ourselves that we bring to our deathbeds is still some way off from the ideal of us that is in God’s mind! The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that there will at least be some points of resemblance between the two! Now to return finally to Our Lady- she is the exception of course. She is the one human being who fits the picture completely, with no discrepancies- as Fulton Sheen says “there is a perfect conformity between what he wanted her to be and what she is”. “Most of us” he says “are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign….the Ideal that God had of her, that she is.” She is the one who is “pure and blameless”, “holy and blameless.”
Dear friends, when St Bernadette saw Our Lady in the grotto, she asked her who she was. “I am the Immaculate Conception” came the astounding reply. What Our Lady is giving us in these words is the explanation, the key, to her whole existence: conceived, brought into being by God as each one of us is, a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and yet immaculate- so at one with God and his will for her that she was brimful of his sanctifying grace, with no room for the slightest iota of sin, and could therefore only be what he had always had in mind for her to be. The explanation, in fact, of every Christian destiny, the ultimate aspiration of every human being: “holy and blameless before him”,as St Paul says. May grace be given to us all this evening to co-operate ever more readily with God, so that the gap between who we are and who he wants us to be narrows and goes on diminishing. May Our Lady aid us by her prayers, so that we come ever closer to fulfilling the high hopes that Our Heavenly Father has of each one of us, so that on the Last Day we too may appear in our humbler turn “holy and blameless before him”, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ”. Amen.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 Nov 2009
Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 November 2009
Since we commemorated Armistice Day last year, the last three survivors of the First World War have gone to their rest in their extreme old age, and so that war, which older generations called the Great War, has now finally passed out of living memory. It was a war that cost ten thousand men’s lives a day and when it was over all over the United Kingdom every town or village, every college, every school, every church- even railway stations like Waterloo - put up its war memorial with those long sad lists of names, the names of all those young men whose lives had been sacrificed. How poignant it is to read the inscriptions on those memorials, how optimistic, how naïve they sound to us now- this was “the War to end War”, the final conflict for the triumph of Liberty, of Justice and Peace- the survivors and the bereaved families just couldn’t believe that sacrifice and slaughter on that vast scale could have been in vain. They so wanted to believe that the words of the Apocalypse we have just heard were to come true in their time: “There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone”. Alas, they were wrong- within the lifetimes of many of those who inscribed such sentiments on the memorials, Europe – and with it, the whole world - was once again convulsed with the horrors of war. And so it is, isn’t it- when one war ends, another starts up so that war just goes on, doesn’t it, somewhere in the world, all the time – the bazaars of Rawalpindi last week have shown us that, and we can’t ever lose sight of the whole ferment of violence that continues along what we used to call The North West Frontier, or the endemic hatred that simmers away in the Middle East. Genocide, which we associate for ever with what the Nazi regime did sixty years ago, has happened in our lifetime in places such as the former Yugoslavia and in Africa –one thinks of Ruanda, of Sierra Leone. We are forced to admit that the words of the Apocalypse have not yet come to pass.
Why is that? Well, one place to look for an answer is the Book of Genesis, whose first eleven chapters preserve for us the many ancient traditions of the Jewish people that explain in the style of myths and legends the nature of God and the nature of human beings. Human beings, destined by their loving Creator for a constant, easy friendship with God, are shown in the Adam and Eve story to be determined to be gods themselves, not content to live by the moral absolutes that are divinely appointed, but determined to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong – “if I want to do it, it’s OK!” The story of Cain and Abel that follows immediately after the story of the Fall shows us at once what human nature is capable of: we see the rivalry between two brothers, a resentment of what one brother seems to enjoy and the other thinks should be his, and this envy and bitterness spilling over into violence, and murder. That terrible reply that Cain gives to God when he asks where Abel is- “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer of course should be yes, we should have always before our eyes the common humanity we share with all our fellow human beings of whatever race or background, and consequently all members of the one human family should be our cause for concern. But Cain has impersonalised the whole issue, he has repudiated the common bond between him and his brother- how often that happens in our world- the prelude to atrocities perpetrated against people we resent and dislike is always the distancing of ourselves from them, by the demonising of propaganda and the irresponsibility of generalisations. We are somehow “Us” and they are “Them”. And we see how from this legend of the two brothers that violence and war have entered our world and will never leave it. Genesis shows the descendents of Cain contrasted against the descendents of the third brother Seth. Seth’s offspring stand for that part of the human race that is trying always for a closer union with God, that is open to the Divine- Seth’s son Enosh we are told “was the first to invoke the name of the Lord” in prayer and of one of his descendants Enoch it is said “he walked with God” and did not see death but was assumed into Heaven. But Cain has a descendant Lamech, who sings proudly of his violent behaviour: “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me” and claims that “sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech”. We see that although one side of the human race is forever aspiring to heavenly things, to peace and concord at one with God, the other side is caught up in a momentum of evil- a violence that is for ever increasing as it goes from one generation to the next, because of the deadly power of bitterness within us and its demand for retaliation and revenge.
And of course the really terrifying thing is, that this relentless violence is in fact a warfare that takes place not only on our TV screens in faraway places but inside each and every one of us- the struggle between Good and Evil, which must go on its weary way till the end of time, is a daily combat in our own souls, where we must take up our arms every day. But is this therefore a cause for despair, that human nature is so fatally corrupt that war and violence must always have their sway? Will the promises of the Apocalypse never come true? The answer lies in our reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. This endless tension within us between impulses to do the right thing by God and by others and urges to have our selfish way no matter what can be reconciled, has been reconciled if we will only allow ourselves to co-operate with God’s endless grace- we must trust in “Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation”. The first step towards peace, the peace of the world we all long for – and every Mass after all is explicitly offered “to advance the peace and salvation of all the world” as Canon III has it – is peace within ourselves, peace between me and God. Only then is there a chance that there may come peace on a larger scale, and we will experience rather than just glimpse the true and lasting peace, “the peace that the world cannot give” only Jesus, whose words we hear at every Mass “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” On this day when we recall with sorrow the appalling loss of life in the two world wars of the last century let us pray that such sacrifices were not in vain, and that the human race will learn its sobering lesson from them, and as our small part let us renew our own commitment to peace- peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbours, peace in the world, but first of all, peace with God. Amen.
Since we commemorated Armistice Day last year, the last three survivors of the First World War have gone to their rest in their extreme old age, and so that war, which older generations called the Great War, has now finally passed out of living memory. It was a war that cost ten thousand men’s lives a day and when it was over all over the United Kingdom every town or village, every college, every school, every church- even railway stations like Waterloo - put up its war memorial with those long sad lists of names, the names of all those young men whose lives had been sacrificed. How poignant it is to read the inscriptions on those memorials, how optimistic, how naïve they sound to us now- this was “the War to end War”, the final conflict for the triumph of Liberty, of Justice and Peace- the survivors and the bereaved families just couldn’t believe that sacrifice and slaughter on that vast scale could have been in vain. They so wanted to believe that the words of the Apocalypse we have just heard were to come true in their time: “There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone”. Alas, they were wrong- within the lifetimes of many of those who inscribed such sentiments on the memorials, Europe – and with it, the whole world - was once again convulsed with the horrors of war. And so it is, isn’t it- when one war ends, another starts up so that war just goes on, doesn’t it, somewhere in the world, all the time – the bazaars of Rawalpindi last week have shown us that, and we can’t ever lose sight of the whole ferment of violence that continues along what we used to call The North West Frontier, or the endemic hatred that simmers away in the Middle East. Genocide, which we associate for ever with what the Nazi regime did sixty years ago, has happened in our lifetime in places such as the former Yugoslavia and in Africa –one thinks of Ruanda, of Sierra Leone. We are forced to admit that the words of the Apocalypse have not yet come to pass.
Why is that? Well, one place to look for an answer is the Book of Genesis, whose first eleven chapters preserve for us the many ancient traditions of the Jewish people that explain in the style of myths and legends the nature of God and the nature of human beings. Human beings, destined by their loving Creator for a constant, easy friendship with God, are shown in the Adam and Eve story to be determined to be gods themselves, not content to live by the moral absolutes that are divinely appointed, but determined to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong – “if I want to do it, it’s OK!” The story of Cain and Abel that follows immediately after the story of the Fall shows us at once what human nature is capable of: we see the rivalry between two brothers, a resentment of what one brother seems to enjoy and the other thinks should be his, and this envy and bitterness spilling over into violence, and murder. That terrible reply that Cain gives to God when he asks where Abel is- “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer of course should be yes, we should have always before our eyes the common humanity we share with all our fellow human beings of whatever race or background, and consequently all members of the one human family should be our cause for concern. But Cain has impersonalised the whole issue, he has repudiated the common bond between him and his brother- how often that happens in our world- the prelude to atrocities perpetrated against people we resent and dislike is always the distancing of ourselves from them, by the demonising of propaganda and the irresponsibility of generalisations. We are somehow “Us” and they are “Them”. And we see how from this legend of the two brothers that violence and war have entered our world and will never leave it. Genesis shows the descendents of Cain contrasted against the descendents of the third brother Seth. Seth’s offspring stand for that part of the human race that is trying always for a closer union with God, that is open to the Divine- Seth’s son Enosh we are told “was the first to invoke the name of the Lord” in prayer and of one of his descendants Enoch it is said “he walked with God” and did not see death but was assumed into Heaven. But Cain has a descendant Lamech, who sings proudly of his violent behaviour: “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me” and claims that “sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech”. We see that although one side of the human race is forever aspiring to heavenly things, to peace and concord at one with God, the other side is caught up in a momentum of evil- a violence that is for ever increasing as it goes from one generation to the next, because of the deadly power of bitterness within us and its demand for retaliation and revenge.
And of course the really terrifying thing is, that this relentless violence is in fact a warfare that takes place not only on our TV screens in faraway places but inside each and every one of us- the struggle between Good and Evil, which must go on its weary way till the end of time, is a daily combat in our own souls, where we must take up our arms every day. But is this therefore a cause for despair, that human nature is so fatally corrupt that war and violence must always have their sway? Will the promises of the Apocalypse never come true? The answer lies in our reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. This endless tension within us between impulses to do the right thing by God and by others and urges to have our selfish way no matter what can be reconciled, has been reconciled if we will only allow ourselves to co-operate with God’s endless grace- we must trust in “Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation”. The first step towards peace, the peace of the world we all long for – and every Mass after all is explicitly offered “to advance the peace and salvation of all the world” as Canon III has it – is peace within ourselves, peace between me and God. Only then is there a chance that there may come peace on a larger scale, and we will experience rather than just glimpse the true and lasting peace, “the peace that the world cannot give” only Jesus, whose words we hear at every Mass “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” On this day when we recall with sorrow the appalling loss of life in the two world wars of the last century let us pray that such sacrifices were not in vain, and that the human race will learn its sobering lesson from them, and as our small part let us renew our own commitment to peace- peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbours, peace in the world, but first of all, peace with God. Amen.
Homily for 25 Oct 2009
Homily for 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 25 October 2009
Today’s Gospel reading about the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus can only be properly understood if we put it in its context in Mark’s Gospel – it comes at the very end of Jesus’s ministry of preaching and healing, as he leaves Galilee, which has been the scene of his ministry so far, and heads for Jerusalem, where events will have their momentum and bring him to the climax of his earthly career, his Passion and Resurrection. This is the end of chapter 10, and chapter 11 begins with Jesus preparing to enter the Holy City, sending two disciples to find the ass he will ride on. So this meeting with Bartimaeus is the occasion of the last miracle that Jesus performs before he enters into his final days on earth, when he is caught up in the Passion that he had been predicting all along to the disciples.
The same chapter, chapter 10 has two other important stories, which we have heard the last two Sundays at Mass. First of all there was a man with every advantage in life- youth and wealth-who approached Our Lord and was thinking of joining him, and our Lord was attracted to him and was ready to welcome him into his band of followers – but, do you remember, the young man couldn’t make the kind of radical change that would be necessary in his life, there were just too many things that he was attached to, things that got in the way, things that he was not prepared to give up, and so he didn’t take up Our Lord’s offer and went his own way. And then we saw last week how even the people who have made a real commitment to Our Lord and who are among his closest friends- James and John- still get things wrong, still fail to understand what Our Lord is really about, what his message really is, what following him will really involve. Do you remember, they say, when you start running the show, when your regime really takes off, can we have the top jobs? And Jesus, shaking his head wearily as he realises that no one seems to be getting the point of what he’s been saying at all, says “You do not know what you are asking”.
But this final story today is quite different, a refreshing note to end the ministry on for Our Lord. Bartimaeus is someone who hasn’t got much going for him –he hasn’t had much of a start in life, he has gone blind and scrapes a precarious living begging by the roadside. He may be blind, but he is certainly intelligent and has the eye of faith- because when the crowd tell him that this passer-by that all the fuss is about is Jesus of Nazareth, notice that he does not then shout out “Jesus of Nazareth!” but “Son of David, Jesus!” He does not just repeat what he has been told, by the people around him who think that this Jesus is just another wandering prophet, another healer grabbing the headlines, or another political activist on his way to stage some great demo, no- he realises that this person is none other than the promised Messiah-“Son of David!” he calls out, the first person apart from Peter so far to give Our Lord this title, to recognise the divine nature of Our Lord. People try to shut him up, but he calls all the louder- how pleasing for Our Lord, after all the hesitations of the rich young man with his cautious questions, that here at last is someone showing a bit of eagerness, someone actually keen! And Our Lord stops and responds- “Call him here!” And look at the reaction of Bartimaeus when the call comes, when Jesus extends the possibility of meeting him- “throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus”. Now what is this cloak? Scholars tell us that this wasn’t really something he wore, but something he used to beg, it was usual in those times (what am I saying, I saw it on tube the other day!) for someone begging to lay their coat down in front of the, with the coins on it that people had given them, to encourage others to give. What Bartimaeus is throwing away without a second’s thought is his livelihood, the way he lives, the whole apparatus of his way of life up to that point. How unlike the young man who couldn’t take his mind off his current way of life. For Bartimaeus, he has met the Lord, the Lord is calling him, and he lets go of everything. What faith he must have had! No wonder that Our Lord, in giving him back his sight, exclaims “Your faith has saved you”. And now there is the further reaction of Bartimaeus to consider. He doesn’t go back and pick up the cloak with its coins, he doesn’t go off as other people have done in the Gospel who have been healed to run and show off to loads of people, he no longer seems to have thought of anything other than being with Our Lord- “he followed him along the road”, in other words he gave himself up from that moment on to leading the Christian life, the “way” as already by the time Mark wrote this, our Faith was being called.
The Fathers of the Church in the early centuries loved this Gospel and many of them have left us their homilies on it. Among them I want to end with quoting from St Cyril, the fifth century bishop of Alexandria, one of the great theologians of his day, who draws the contrast between the crowd around Jesus who could see him but didn’t realise who he was, and Bartimaeus who “felt his presence, and laid hold of him with his heart whom his eye could not see”. That is a great phrase isn’t it and one for us- we are not living during the time that Jesus walked the earth and our eyes cannot see him. But we have our Faith and by it we recognise Our Lord, as the disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of Bread. In the Blessed Sacrament we can feel his presence. Soon the bread and wine offered on our altar will become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will be supernaturally among us, he will be passing by Lewisham just as he passed in this story by Jericho. There will be that moment, at communion time, when Our Lord will be passing along our altar rails to meet us. The priest will say “Behold the Lamb of God” but underneath those words we may hear other words, the words of this Gospel :“Courage, get up, he is calling you!” Let us examine our lives afresh and ask ourselves if we have a cloak that we need to throw off, if there is something, some attitude, some attachment, that is holding us back, that is preventing us from accepting the invitation of Our Lord to follow him, that is hindering us from making the wholehearted response we know we should. Does it seem daunting, we may like that old cloak, it is so familiar. We are so used to it, we can hardly imagine doing without it. But what are those words again “Courage, get up, he is calling you!” May we come in answer to Our Lord’s appeal, and, like Bartimaeus, let us, in St Cyril’s words, lay hold on him with our hearts whom our eyes cannot see. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading about the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus can only be properly understood if we put it in its context in Mark’s Gospel – it comes at the very end of Jesus’s ministry of preaching and healing, as he leaves Galilee, which has been the scene of his ministry so far, and heads for Jerusalem, where events will have their momentum and bring him to the climax of his earthly career, his Passion and Resurrection. This is the end of chapter 10, and chapter 11 begins with Jesus preparing to enter the Holy City, sending two disciples to find the ass he will ride on. So this meeting with Bartimaeus is the occasion of the last miracle that Jesus performs before he enters into his final days on earth, when he is caught up in the Passion that he had been predicting all along to the disciples.
The same chapter, chapter 10 has two other important stories, which we have heard the last two Sundays at Mass. First of all there was a man with every advantage in life- youth and wealth-who approached Our Lord and was thinking of joining him, and our Lord was attracted to him and was ready to welcome him into his band of followers – but, do you remember, the young man couldn’t make the kind of radical change that would be necessary in his life, there were just too many things that he was attached to, things that got in the way, things that he was not prepared to give up, and so he didn’t take up Our Lord’s offer and went his own way. And then we saw last week how even the people who have made a real commitment to Our Lord and who are among his closest friends- James and John- still get things wrong, still fail to understand what Our Lord is really about, what his message really is, what following him will really involve. Do you remember, they say, when you start running the show, when your regime really takes off, can we have the top jobs? And Jesus, shaking his head wearily as he realises that no one seems to be getting the point of what he’s been saying at all, says “You do not know what you are asking”.
But this final story today is quite different, a refreshing note to end the ministry on for Our Lord. Bartimaeus is someone who hasn’t got much going for him –he hasn’t had much of a start in life, he has gone blind and scrapes a precarious living begging by the roadside. He may be blind, but he is certainly intelligent and has the eye of faith- because when the crowd tell him that this passer-by that all the fuss is about is Jesus of Nazareth, notice that he does not then shout out “Jesus of Nazareth!” but “Son of David, Jesus!” He does not just repeat what he has been told, by the people around him who think that this Jesus is just another wandering prophet, another healer grabbing the headlines, or another political activist on his way to stage some great demo, no- he realises that this person is none other than the promised Messiah-“Son of David!” he calls out, the first person apart from Peter so far to give Our Lord this title, to recognise the divine nature of Our Lord. People try to shut him up, but he calls all the louder- how pleasing for Our Lord, after all the hesitations of the rich young man with his cautious questions, that here at last is someone showing a bit of eagerness, someone actually keen! And Our Lord stops and responds- “Call him here!” And look at the reaction of Bartimaeus when the call comes, when Jesus extends the possibility of meeting him- “throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus”. Now what is this cloak? Scholars tell us that this wasn’t really something he wore, but something he used to beg, it was usual in those times (what am I saying, I saw it on tube the other day!) for someone begging to lay their coat down in front of the, with the coins on it that people had given them, to encourage others to give. What Bartimaeus is throwing away without a second’s thought is his livelihood, the way he lives, the whole apparatus of his way of life up to that point. How unlike the young man who couldn’t take his mind off his current way of life. For Bartimaeus, he has met the Lord, the Lord is calling him, and he lets go of everything. What faith he must have had! No wonder that Our Lord, in giving him back his sight, exclaims “Your faith has saved you”. And now there is the further reaction of Bartimaeus to consider. He doesn’t go back and pick up the cloak with its coins, he doesn’t go off as other people have done in the Gospel who have been healed to run and show off to loads of people, he no longer seems to have thought of anything other than being with Our Lord- “he followed him along the road”, in other words he gave himself up from that moment on to leading the Christian life, the “way” as already by the time Mark wrote this, our Faith was being called.
The Fathers of the Church in the early centuries loved this Gospel and many of them have left us their homilies on it. Among them I want to end with quoting from St Cyril, the fifth century bishop of Alexandria, one of the great theologians of his day, who draws the contrast between the crowd around Jesus who could see him but didn’t realise who he was, and Bartimaeus who “felt his presence, and laid hold of him with his heart whom his eye could not see”. That is a great phrase isn’t it and one for us- we are not living during the time that Jesus walked the earth and our eyes cannot see him. But we have our Faith and by it we recognise Our Lord, as the disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of Bread. In the Blessed Sacrament we can feel his presence. Soon the bread and wine offered on our altar will become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will be supernaturally among us, he will be passing by Lewisham just as he passed in this story by Jericho. There will be that moment, at communion time, when Our Lord will be passing along our altar rails to meet us. The priest will say “Behold the Lamb of God” but underneath those words we may hear other words, the words of this Gospel :“Courage, get up, he is calling you!” Let us examine our lives afresh and ask ourselves if we have a cloak that we need to throw off, if there is something, some attitude, some attachment, that is holding us back, that is preventing us from accepting the invitation of Our Lord to follow him, that is hindering us from making the wholehearted response we know we should. Does it seem daunting, we may like that old cloak, it is so familiar. We are so used to it, we can hardly imagine doing without it. But what are those words again “Courage, get up, he is calling you!” May we come in answer to Our Lord’s appeal, and, like Bartimaeus, let us, in St Cyril’s words, lay hold on him with our hearts whom our eyes cannot see. Amen.
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Homily for 9 august 2009
Homily for Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 9 August 2009
Today’s Gospel is part of a whole series of readings on the theme of the Eucharist that in Year B the Church asks us to reflect upon week by week in the summer. Two weeks ago we have seen how Our Lord is there to nourish us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, how Our Lord has compassion on the hunger of the people and feeds them- he sees their hunger for what it really is, a hunger for spiritual things, for something, someone, that will nourish the soul and bring us to our true stature as children of God. We saw in that Gospel too that Our Lord is generous in his love, that his care of us exceeds all that we could imagine or expect, because not only is everyone fed in that story, there are the twelve baskets still left over, there is more, always more to come for us from the love of God. Last week we heard Jesus say “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry”. He spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to search for the “food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering” – not to limit their horizons simply to satisfying their hunger for the things of this world,, their appetites for material things, things that come and go, that pass away, but to aim higher, to address that other appetite that is within each one of us, that hunger for a connexion with the divine, that yearning for our life to have meaning, meaning in the sight of God, real meaning and not just the labels of fantasy that we may imagine we have. And we heard last week how at the end of Our Lord’s discourse, even though they hardly knew what they said, the crowd cried out “Sir, give us that bread always!” - a little phrase that it is good to repeat sometimes as we approach the moment of Communion- “Lord, give us that bread always!”
But what is the Bread? What does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd “I am the bread of life”? In today’s Gospel he expounds this further- “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and he tells them that “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Not only is Jesus providing the nourishment we need but he actually in some way is the nourishment. No wonder, in the very next verse that follows this Gospel, we read that many of the disciples didn’t like the sound of it-“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” and at the end of this chapter 6 the evangelist tells us that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with him”. The idea that somehow Jesus would give his body to be eaten by his followers is still quite a shocking, bizarre idea today. To his Jewish hearers it was appalling, because they had a long tradition of this being the ultimate degradation for an enemy who had been killed, the ultimate horror for a sinner who died in his sins. The prophet Ezekiel (39:17-20) in one of his oracles has God telling man to get ready for the day when the enemies of God will be slain, to tell all the birds and all the animals to come to this great feast- “gather from all sides” says God “to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast…and you shall eat flesh and drink blood, you shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth”.
And so when Our Lord is saying that the bread that he will give is his flesh, he is referring to his coming death on the Cross. He will be slain, he will die not as a sinner dying in his sins, but as the all-innocent one dying in our sins. And just as the body of the hated enemy will be exposed to be eaten, so too the body of the One whom mankind rejected and to whom such hostility was shown in the Passion and Crucifixion will be offered to be eaten. In a sense, for Our Lord, the constant giving of himself to us in Holy Communion is an ongoing part of the Passion, an ongoing vulnerability, an ongoing putting of himself in our hands to see what we will do with him. And Ezekiel’s prophecy comes true for us at every Mass- the Mass is “the sacrificial feast” that God says he is preparing for us. “You shall be filled at my table” he says, “you shall eat the flesh of the mighty”- we know that Jesus is the mighty, he is God the Son of the Father- “you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth”- well, we consume the body and blood, soul and divinity of not a prince of this world, but the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe. And God says again via Ezekiel “You shall eat till you are filled”.
We cannot easily comprehend how this happens, how it is that the bread offered on our altars by our priests is changed in its essence by the words of consecration into the Body of Christ, the bread that I shall give which is my flesh for the life of the world. We can use technical terms like transubstantiation if that helps us, we can learn the definitions in the catechisms old and new, but in the end, however clever we are, however blessed with insight we are, we have to go on faith alone. This is what we believe, what the Church has always believed, and we take it on trust, the trust that we call the Faith that comes to us from the apostles. And that is what Our Lord was looking for in his discourse in today’s Gospel, that is the reaction he wanted from his audience- he was hoping for the response of Faith- “I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life” Our Lord knows that faith is not always easy, that it is a grace, a gift from God- he speaks here of those who do believe as being “drawn by the Father” and “taught by God”- to have this kind of faith, this trusting confidence in God’s words, is “to hear the teaching of the Father and learn from it”, Jesus tells us- and that means inevitably “to come to me”.
These Gospel passages contain “hard sayings” indeed, but let us not be among those who draw back because we do not understand and cannot accept these awe-inspiring words and their still shocking meaning. Let us instead accept the invitation of God that he gives in Ezekiel and “gather from all sides to the great sacrificial feast” that he is preparing for us, let us come to Communion to have our hunger for God’s love satisfied and to absorb into our human lives the divine life, “the flesh of the mighty”. Lord, give us this bread always! Amen.
Today’s Gospel is part of a whole series of readings on the theme of the Eucharist that in Year B the Church asks us to reflect upon week by week in the summer. Two weeks ago we have seen how Our Lord is there to nourish us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, how Our Lord has compassion on the hunger of the people and feeds them- he sees their hunger for what it really is, a hunger for spiritual things, for something, someone, that will nourish the soul and bring us to our true stature as children of God. We saw in that Gospel too that Our Lord is generous in his love, that his care of us exceeds all that we could imagine or expect, because not only is everyone fed in that story, there are the twelve baskets still left over, there is more, always more to come for us from the love of God. Last week we heard Jesus say “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry”. He spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to search for the “food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering” – not to limit their horizons simply to satisfying their hunger for the things of this world,, their appetites for material things, things that come and go, that pass away, but to aim higher, to address that other appetite that is within each one of us, that hunger for a connexion with the divine, that yearning for our life to have meaning, meaning in the sight of God, real meaning and not just the labels of fantasy that we may imagine we have. And we heard last week how at the end of Our Lord’s discourse, even though they hardly knew what they said, the crowd cried out “Sir, give us that bread always!” - a little phrase that it is good to repeat sometimes as we approach the moment of Communion- “Lord, give us that bread always!”
But what is the Bread? What does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd “I am the bread of life”? In today’s Gospel he expounds this further- “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and he tells them that “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Not only is Jesus providing the nourishment we need but he actually in some way is the nourishment. No wonder, in the very next verse that follows this Gospel, we read that many of the disciples didn’t like the sound of it-“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” and at the end of this chapter 6 the evangelist tells us that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with him”. The idea that somehow Jesus would give his body to be eaten by his followers is still quite a shocking, bizarre idea today. To his Jewish hearers it was appalling, because they had a long tradition of this being the ultimate degradation for an enemy who had been killed, the ultimate horror for a sinner who died in his sins. The prophet Ezekiel (39:17-20) in one of his oracles has God telling man to get ready for the day when the enemies of God will be slain, to tell all the birds and all the animals to come to this great feast- “gather from all sides” says God “to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast…and you shall eat flesh and drink blood, you shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth”.
And so when Our Lord is saying that the bread that he will give is his flesh, he is referring to his coming death on the Cross. He will be slain, he will die not as a sinner dying in his sins, but as the all-innocent one dying in our sins. And just as the body of the hated enemy will be exposed to be eaten, so too the body of the One whom mankind rejected and to whom such hostility was shown in the Passion and Crucifixion will be offered to be eaten. In a sense, for Our Lord, the constant giving of himself to us in Holy Communion is an ongoing part of the Passion, an ongoing vulnerability, an ongoing putting of himself in our hands to see what we will do with him. And Ezekiel’s prophecy comes true for us at every Mass- the Mass is “the sacrificial feast” that God says he is preparing for us. “You shall be filled at my table” he says, “you shall eat the flesh of the mighty”- we know that Jesus is the mighty, he is God the Son of the Father- “you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth”- well, we consume the body and blood, soul and divinity of not a prince of this world, but the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe. And God says again via Ezekiel “You shall eat till you are filled”.
We cannot easily comprehend how this happens, how it is that the bread offered on our altars by our priests is changed in its essence by the words of consecration into the Body of Christ, the bread that I shall give which is my flesh for the life of the world. We can use technical terms like transubstantiation if that helps us, we can learn the definitions in the catechisms old and new, but in the end, however clever we are, however blessed with insight we are, we have to go on faith alone. This is what we believe, what the Church has always believed, and we take it on trust, the trust that we call the Faith that comes to us from the apostles. And that is what Our Lord was looking for in his discourse in today’s Gospel, that is the reaction he wanted from his audience- he was hoping for the response of Faith- “I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life” Our Lord knows that faith is not always easy, that it is a grace, a gift from God- he speaks here of those who do believe as being “drawn by the Father” and “taught by God”- to have this kind of faith, this trusting confidence in God’s words, is “to hear the teaching of the Father and learn from it”, Jesus tells us- and that means inevitably “to come to me”.
These Gospel passages contain “hard sayings” indeed, but let us not be among those who draw back because we do not understand and cannot accept these awe-inspiring words and their still shocking meaning. Let us instead accept the invitation of God that he gives in Ezekiel and “gather from all sides to the great sacrificial feast” that he is preparing for us, let us come to Communion to have our hunger for God’s love satisfied and to absorb into our human lives the divine life, “the flesh of the mighty”. Lord, give us this bread always! Amen.
Homily for 23 August 2009
Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 23 August 2009
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
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