Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 13 June 2010
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Homily for Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Pentecost 2010
Homily for Pentecost 23 May 2010 (Yr c)
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Sixth Sunday of Easter 2010
Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter 9 May 2010
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Palm Sunday 2010
Homily for Palm Sunday 28 March 2010
Today we commemorate in our Liturgy the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when he arrives in a sort of pageant that his disciples arrange for him, so that he enters the city that is to be the scene of his final struggle with the powers of evil and death in a triumphal procession. Now the evangelists as we know wrote their Gospels very carefully and wanted us to pick up from the way they described things all sorts of allusions and echoes from the Old Testament that would help us to give greater meaning to what they are relating for us. This morning I want to reflect with you on one of these echoes, which is the entry of Simon Macchabaeus into Jerusalem when this great military leader of the Jews had managed to regain control of Jerusalem after it had been in the hands of the Syrians and after the Temple had been desecrated and abandoned.
This is all recounted for us in the two books of Macchabees, very late additions to the Old Testament which were written only about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. We read that Simon expelled all the enemies from the Holy City and “cleansed the citadel from its pollutions” (I Macc 13:50) and then it says “the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches….and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel”. It seems impossible that the disciples did not have this passage in mind when they arranged for Jesus to come into Jerusalem with the crowds of his followers waving their palms – especially as the original event, the arrival of Simon Maccabaeus in triumph, was only 150 or so years before. Here, the evangelists seem to be saying, is another great leader, coming to put things right, coming to the Holy City, coming to the Temple to cleanse it, but coming unlike Simon fresh from his triumphs but in Jesus’s case ready to face his enemies and conquer them. It is interesting to see how, in Matthew Mark and Luke, the arrival of Jesus in this way, with the crowds singing hymns and waving palms, is immediately followed by the cleansing of the Temple: Mark says he went straight to the Temple “looked around at everything” but put off the cleansing of it until the next day “as it was already late” (Mk 11:11) but Matthew and Luke say he did it straightaway “And Jesus entered the Temple of God” says Matthew “and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple” (Mt 21:12) while Luke says “and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold” (Lk 19:45). The victor arrives in the Holy City which has been in the hands of the enemy and he cleanses it and makes it holy again.
Twenty years before this, in 165 BC, Simon’s brother Judas Macchabaeus had also managed to retake Jerusalem, although not permanently. The Jews were horrified when they recaptured the city and saw the state the Temple was in – there was an altar to the Greek God Zeus where the Holy of Holies had been and in chapter 4 of I Macchabees we read “they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket….”(I Macc 4:38) And now it was that a miracle occurred, for when they tried to relight the sanctuary lamp that should always burn in the Temple, there was only enough oil to last one day, but in fact it lasted eight days – time enough for them to press some fresh olives and produce a new supply of the olive oil that they burned. Because of this, the Jews declared a new feast, the feast of the rededication of the Temple, to be held every year. This is the feast that Jewish people still keep today, it falls in December around Christmas time and it is called Channukah, and it lasts for eight days. Sometimes it is also called the Feast of Lights, because the way Jewish people celebrate it is to have a special eight-branched candlestick in their homes which they light more lights one every evening that the feast lasts. The rabbis say that these lights are not “for the house within” but should be put in the doorway or on the windowsill because they are “of the house without” – they are meant to give light to the outside, not the inside. And this aspect of the entry into Jerusalem, of the making holy again, of the miraculous light which God gave to make the rededication of the Temple possible, the whole festival of Lights that the Jews held to remind themselves of these events, has its echo I think in John’s Gospel. John as you know records things always a bit differently from the other three evangelists and he has already used the story of the cleansing of the Temple by the angry Jesus much earlier on in his Gospel. But in John, showing I think that he too is thinking of these same events in recent Jewish history, soon after his entry into Jerusalem Jesus starts talking about Light. John tells us that “Jesus said to them “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light….while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light”.” (Jn 12:35-6).
Today we celebrate this solemn entry of Our Lord the victor, the cleanser, into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him to into our lives, let us ask him to make his solemn entry today into our hearts: let us ask him to expel from our hearts the enemies that lurk there – our selfishness and what our dear Holy Father calls “our mysterious complicity with sin” – let us allow him to cleanse the sanctuary of our hearts and rededicate it to God’s service. Heaven knows, the sanctuary of my heart is a bit overgrown, I have a few brambles and weeds growing there and maybe yours is in the same sad and neglected state. Now is the hour for the great cleansing of our hearts. Dear Jesus, as we rededicate ourselves to you today, give us that miraculous light that will shine into every corner of our lives to purify us, you are the Light of the World, help us to believe in the Light that we may become sons and daughters of light. Hosanna, come and save us! Amen.
Today we commemorate in our Liturgy the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when he arrives in a sort of pageant that his disciples arrange for him, so that he enters the city that is to be the scene of his final struggle with the powers of evil and death in a triumphal procession. Now the evangelists as we know wrote their Gospels very carefully and wanted us to pick up from the way they described things all sorts of allusions and echoes from the Old Testament that would help us to give greater meaning to what they are relating for us. This morning I want to reflect with you on one of these echoes, which is the entry of Simon Macchabaeus into Jerusalem when this great military leader of the Jews had managed to regain control of Jerusalem after it had been in the hands of the Syrians and after the Temple had been desecrated and abandoned.
This is all recounted for us in the two books of Macchabees, very late additions to the Old Testament which were written only about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. We read that Simon expelled all the enemies from the Holy City and “cleansed the citadel from its pollutions” (I Macc 13:50) and then it says “the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches….and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel”. It seems impossible that the disciples did not have this passage in mind when they arranged for Jesus to come into Jerusalem with the crowds of his followers waving their palms – especially as the original event, the arrival of Simon Maccabaeus in triumph, was only 150 or so years before. Here, the evangelists seem to be saying, is another great leader, coming to put things right, coming to the Holy City, coming to the Temple to cleanse it, but coming unlike Simon fresh from his triumphs but in Jesus’s case ready to face his enemies and conquer them. It is interesting to see how, in Matthew Mark and Luke, the arrival of Jesus in this way, with the crowds singing hymns and waving palms, is immediately followed by the cleansing of the Temple: Mark says he went straight to the Temple “looked around at everything” but put off the cleansing of it until the next day “as it was already late” (Mk 11:11) but Matthew and Luke say he did it straightaway “And Jesus entered the Temple of God” says Matthew “and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple” (Mt 21:12) while Luke says “and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold” (Lk 19:45). The victor arrives in the Holy City which has been in the hands of the enemy and he cleanses it and makes it holy again.
Twenty years before this, in 165 BC, Simon’s brother Judas Macchabaeus had also managed to retake Jerusalem, although not permanently. The Jews were horrified when they recaptured the city and saw the state the Temple was in – there was an altar to the Greek God Zeus where the Holy of Holies had been and in chapter 4 of I Macchabees we read “they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket….”(I Macc 4:38) And now it was that a miracle occurred, for when they tried to relight the sanctuary lamp that should always burn in the Temple, there was only enough oil to last one day, but in fact it lasted eight days – time enough for them to press some fresh olives and produce a new supply of the olive oil that they burned. Because of this, the Jews declared a new feast, the feast of the rededication of the Temple, to be held every year. This is the feast that Jewish people still keep today, it falls in December around Christmas time and it is called Channukah, and it lasts for eight days. Sometimes it is also called the Feast of Lights, because the way Jewish people celebrate it is to have a special eight-branched candlestick in their homes which they light more lights one every evening that the feast lasts. The rabbis say that these lights are not “for the house within” but should be put in the doorway or on the windowsill because they are “of the house without” – they are meant to give light to the outside, not the inside. And this aspect of the entry into Jerusalem, of the making holy again, of the miraculous light which God gave to make the rededication of the Temple possible, the whole festival of Lights that the Jews held to remind themselves of these events, has its echo I think in John’s Gospel. John as you know records things always a bit differently from the other three evangelists and he has already used the story of the cleansing of the Temple by the angry Jesus much earlier on in his Gospel. But in John, showing I think that he too is thinking of these same events in recent Jewish history, soon after his entry into Jerusalem Jesus starts talking about Light. John tells us that “Jesus said to them “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light….while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light”.” (Jn 12:35-6).
Today we celebrate this solemn entry of Our Lord the victor, the cleanser, into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him to into our lives, let us ask him to make his solemn entry today into our hearts: let us ask him to expel from our hearts the enemies that lurk there – our selfishness and what our dear Holy Father calls “our mysterious complicity with sin” – let us allow him to cleanse the sanctuary of our hearts and rededicate it to God’s service. Heaven knows, the sanctuary of my heart is a bit overgrown, I have a few brambles and weeds growing there and maybe yours is in the same sad and neglected state. Now is the hour for the great cleansing of our hearts. Dear Jesus, as we rededicate ourselves to you today, give us that miraculous light that will shine into every corner of our lives to purify us, you are the Light of the World, help us to believe in the Light that we may become sons and daughters of light. Hosanna, come and save us! Amen.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Good Friday 2010
Homily for Good Friday 2 April 2010
Here we are gathered together on the saddest day in the Church’s year, the day of the death of Jesus, the day on which he mounted the Cross and died there. The Cross, so central to our Faith that it is the prime symbol of Christianity all over the world, the Cross which we shall come at the end of our Liturgy today to venerate with all our homage and our sorrow. We recall the various predictions that Jesus made –either openly or in hints to his closest companions- of his death, and the manner of it, and there is a saying of his about the Christian life in general that springs unbidden to the mind today: when Jesus says “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mt 16:24) If we are to be true followers of Christ, then we too must go the way he has gone, and go to the cross – that is to say, we must first of all recognise what our cross is, because it will be a personal cross, particular to me, and then we must deal with it, deal with whatever it is in a way that is not the way of denial, nor the way of bitterness and resentment, but the way of acceptance, so that eventually by the mysterious chemistry that always occurs when good and evil meet, this acceptance and calm realism will bring to us and to those around us nothing but good, even the greatest good, which is our salvation.
The French thinker Jean Paul Sartre developed the philosophy called existentialism, which had such a vogue in my youth. He said other people try to tell us who we are, try to label us and define us, that is why “other people are hell” – whereas in fact we should do our utmost not to let them, not to let anybody else tell us who we are, only we, in some glorious isolation, decide who we are. Complete rubbish of course, because we are constantly from our birth on caught up in a thousand criss-crossing relations with other people that all have their effect on us, just as we too are having a thousand effects on them. Our dear Holy Father spoke about this inter-relation that we are all caught up in in his book on the four last things “Eschatology” back in the 80s: he says “the being of man is not that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and in these ways it has colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves….we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny”. How does this fit in with the Cross? Because Jesus suffers on the Cross in his sacred humanity, which somehow capitulates within it the whole experience of all humanity, and consequently holds within himself all the momentum of evil that our hurts and hatreds, our vendettas and vindictiveness, have carried on creating throughout time. That is the burden of the Cross that he has to drag through the streets of the Holy City, that is the agony he has to endure, the myriad echoes within him of all our unresolved wrongs and wrongdoings that resonate ever louder down the ages. And it is there on the Cross, in his patient and willing accepting of all this, that Our Lord manages in a supreme cataclysm of love and forgiveness finally to halt all this in its tracks and to turn it round, to send it back on itself, in a new momentum of healing and forgiving, that will transform the whole mess of mankind’s sinning into a thousand new possibilities for love and for good. This is what the Psalmist means when he says (Ps 9:14) “You have seen the trouble and sorrow, you note it, you take it in hand”.
Long ago in the 5th century the saintly Bishop of Ravenna in Italy – Peter Chrysologus- compared Jesus on Good Friday going to the Cross to a farmer going out to his field, and taking with him the tool he will need to plough up the field and ensure that in due course there will be a harvest from it. Our own sins –my own flawed personality is in there too – have added to the burden and the agony, they are part of the field that needs to be tilled, but on the Cross it is all wiped out and done away with forever, the cumulative sin of all humanity and ours too, the field is worked over and made ready for its proper use, its yield. “It is accomplished” says Jesus as he dies, “consummatum est” or in the Greek one word “tetelestai”. Archaeologists have found a collection of wax tablets from a tax office from the time of Christ, and that is the word written on those accounts that have been paid off- finished, paid in full, as we might say today. It is finished, the tool of the Cross has done its work, and it only remains for us to take up our own cross and in so doing become the harvest that Jesus has toiled so hard for- to let go of the hurts people have inflicted on us and the hurts we have inflicted – our trespasses and those who trespass against us.- and to reverse in our own lives the momentum of evil and to allow his victory to cleanse us and make us whole. We are caught up forever with each other, and we are caught up forever with Our Lord, we live in the words of the Canon “through him, with him, in him”. Dear Jesus may we always live so that our fellow human beings see in us “the tokens of your love and mercy”, so that we live in them as grace and not as guilt, and let your dying words “It is finished” resonate forever in our hearts cancelling out all the harm and hurt that linger there. Amen.
Here we are gathered together on the saddest day in the Church’s year, the day of the death of Jesus, the day on which he mounted the Cross and died there. The Cross, so central to our Faith that it is the prime symbol of Christianity all over the world, the Cross which we shall come at the end of our Liturgy today to venerate with all our homage and our sorrow. We recall the various predictions that Jesus made –either openly or in hints to his closest companions- of his death, and the manner of it, and there is a saying of his about the Christian life in general that springs unbidden to the mind today: when Jesus says “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mt 16:24) If we are to be true followers of Christ, then we too must go the way he has gone, and go to the cross – that is to say, we must first of all recognise what our cross is, because it will be a personal cross, particular to me, and then we must deal with it, deal with whatever it is in a way that is not the way of denial, nor the way of bitterness and resentment, but the way of acceptance, so that eventually by the mysterious chemistry that always occurs when good and evil meet, this acceptance and calm realism will bring to us and to those around us nothing but good, even the greatest good, which is our salvation.
The French thinker Jean Paul Sartre developed the philosophy called existentialism, which had such a vogue in my youth. He said other people try to tell us who we are, try to label us and define us, that is why “other people are hell” – whereas in fact we should do our utmost not to let them, not to let anybody else tell us who we are, only we, in some glorious isolation, decide who we are. Complete rubbish of course, because we are constantly from our birth on caught up in a thousand criss-crossing relations with other people that all have their effect on us, just as we too are having a thousand effects on them. Our dear Holy Father spoke about this inter-relation that we are all caught up in in his book on the four last things “Eschatology” back in the 80s: he says “the being of man is not that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and in these ways it has colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves….we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny”. How does this fit in with the Cross? Because Jesus suffers on the Cross in his sacred humanity, which somehow capitulates within it the whole experience of all humanity, and consequently holds within himself all the momentum of evil that our hurts and hatreds, our vendettas and vindictiveness, have carried on creating throughout time. That is the burden of the Cross that he has to drag through the streets of the Holy City, that is the agony he has to endure, the myriad echoes within him of all our unresolved wrongs and wrongdoings that resonate ever louder down the ages. And it is there on the Cross, in his patient and willing accepting of all this, that Our Lord manages in a supreme cataclysm of love and forgiveness finally to halt all this in its tracks and to turn it round, to send it back on itself, in a new momentum of healing and forgiving, that will transform the whole mess of mankind’s sinning into a thousand new possibilities for love and for good. This is what the Psalmist means when he says (Ps 9:14) “You have seen the trouble and sorrow, you note it, you take it in hand”.
Long ago in the 5th century the saintly Bishop of Ravenna in Italy – Peter Chrysologus- compared Jesus on Good Friday going to the Cross to a farmer going out to his field, and taking with him the tool he will need to plough up the field and ensure that in due course there will be a harvest from it. Our own sins –my own flawed personality is in there too – have added to the burden and the agony, they are part of the field that needs to be tilled, but on the Cross it is all wiped out and done away with forever, the cumulative sin of all humanity and ours too, the field is worked over and made ready for its proper use, its yield. “It is accomplished” says Jesus as he dies, “consummatum est” or in the Greek one word “tetelestai”. Archaeologists have found a collection of wax tablets from a tax office from the time of Christ, and that is the word written on those accounts that have been paid off- finished, paid in full, as we might say today. It is finished, the tool of the Cross has done its work, and it only remains for us to take up our own cross and in so doing become the harvest that Jesus has toiled so hard for- to let go of the hurts people have inflicted on us and the hurts we have inflicted – our trespasses and those who trespass against us.- and to reverse in our own lives the momentum of evil and to allow his victory to cleanse us and make us whole. We are caught up forever with each other, and we are caught up forever with Our Lord, we live in the words of the Canon “through him, with him, in him”. Dear Jesus may we always live so that our fellow human beings see in us “the tokens of your love and mercy”, so that we live in them as grace and not as guilt, and let your dying words “It is finished” resonate forever in our hearts cancelling out all the harm and hurt that linger there. Amen.
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Homily for 24 January 2010
Homily for Third Sunday of Year C 24 January 2010
I want to this morning to look at our Old Testament reading – so often we just let that first reading pass us by, don’t we, perhaps we half expect the Old Testament to be dull and boring, or even not to make sense – this is by no means an uncommon view! In fact in the first century of the Church’s history there was even a suggestion, made by the heretic Marcion, that the Church should ditch the Old Testament and leave it to the Jews- what had it got to do with us? And for several years, even in St Augustine’s time in the fourth century, there were many people who found the Old Testament so off-putting that it effectively stopped them becoming Christians at all, and our pagan opponents were very scornful of the way the Old Testament was written- so unlike all the accounts of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses written in beautiful poetry, and with all its bloodthirsty stories of war and conquest so unlike the deep thoughts, so calmly expressed, of the great philosophers like Plato. They would laugh at their Christian friends “Do you mean to tell me you actually believe all that rubbish, how can you? Just a load of Bedouins killing each other!” In fact, St Augustine himself couldn’t bring himself to become a Catholic until he heard the sermons in Milan of St Ambrose, explaining just how to approach and understand the Old Testament. So let’s look at today’s reading.
It is set in the middle of the fourth century BC when the Jews had returned from their long captivity in Babylon and were gradually rebuilding their national life and their identity as God’s holy people. Ezra was the man in charge, and he was particularly anxious that the people should reacquaint themselves with the scriptures, and with God’s Law which they contained- how else would they ever get the country off to a good start again? His right hand man in all this was Nehemiah, and today’s reading comes from his memoirs. It describes the scene at one of the great gatherings of the people that Ezra and the clergy would organise, at which all the scriptures were read. Look how the people react- they know that the scriptures are the presence of God in their midst, they know that they are hearing the Word of God addressed to them, that is why they immediately take up the posture of worship – they cry out “Amen, amen!” and they “bowed down….and prostrated themselves before the Lord”. And as well as just reading it out, we see that Ezra preaches on the Word of God, “translating and giving the sense so that the people understood what was read”. This is what we have to do at Mass every Sunday isn’t it- clergy and readers, we have to read you the scriptures so that it makes sense and you understand! A most important task, because let’s face it, how many of us have a Bible at home, and if we do how many of us open it? And of course opening it is a daunting thing in itself, it’s a bit like opening a phone book or an encyclopaedia- you’ve got to know what you are looking for and where to go. (I recommend as a user-friendly way of becoming familiar with the word of God to use one of the monthly booklets of daily readings that we have in our shop!)
Of course as they sat there –or lay there- hearing the scriptures, it didn’t make such comfortable reading to these newly returned Jews –as the demands that God was making of them sank in, as they began to grasp all the implications of the high expectations that God had of them, they felt a bit crestfallen- “they were in tears as they listened to the words of the Law”. Well, that’s not entirely a bad thing, you know- at least it meant they were taking it seriously, not just shrugging it all off as beyond them, the unrealistic demands of religion. You know what I mean! But Nehemiah encourages them and tells them that actually, although it is always an awesome, rather sobering experience to put ourselves in the presence of God and to reflect on the shortcomings of our lives contrasted to the hopes he has for each of us, nevertheless putting ourselves in this closeness to God is and can only be a source of joy. Nehemiah tells them to enjoy life- hey, it’s party time! “Go eat the fat, drink the sweet wine!” – and to share their happiness with the less fortunate- “send a portion to the man who has nothing”. It’s all there, isn’t it, our understanding not only of the presence of God in the scriptures, but even a hint of the eucharist to come in the distant future. We who come to church today, we are not unlike those Jews of Nehemiah’s time: they were returning to their faith, trying to pick up their old ways of religious practice, wanting to get it right, and in a way we are always returning aren’t we? We come to mass and as we recollect ourselves in a moment’s prayer we know our feet have strayed a bit since we were last in our pew, there have been a few things we’re uneasy about, a few moments we’d rather not dwell on – we are all always returning! We return, we show up again Sunday by Sunday, and we put ourselves once more in the presence of God- in the Tabernacle, in the Scriptures- and it is, of course it is, partly a source of sadness to us, as our conscience gives us a bit of a kick, that is why every Mass commences with the Confiteor, I confess… But the joy is greater than the sorrow, isn’t it, the joy that invades our hearts as we recognise Our Lord in our midst and know that we are in the right place, where we should be, close to the One who looks on us with eyes of welcome, of understanding and of love- he will put things right for us if we let him, for as Nehemiah knew well “the joy of the Lord is (y)our stronghold”.
Let us follow the advice in this ancient text this morning- we reverence the Word of God that we hear, for it is the living communication of the living God, addressed to us today; we take its message to our hearts; we are honest enough with ourselves to know that there is much in our lives to regret, but such is our trust in God and his love for us we rejoice. Let us go from this Mass refreshed by the presence of the Lord in his Word and in his Sacred Body – let us “eat the fat and drink the sweet wine” and let our joy in the Lord overflow into care for those we see around us who are in need- let us “send a portion to the man who has nothing prepared ready”, “for this day is sacred to our Lord”. Amen.
I want to this morning to look at our Old Testament reading – so often we just let that first reading pass us by, don’t we, perhaps we half expect the Old Testament to be dull and boring, or even not to make sense – this is by no means an uncommon view! In fact in the first century of the Church’s history there was even a suggestion, made by the heretic Marcion, that the Church should ditch the Old Testament and leave it to the Jews- what had it got to do with us? And for several years, even in St Augustine’s time in the fourth century, there were many people who found the Old Testament so off-putting that it effectively stopped them becoming Christians at all, and our pagan opponents were very scornful of the way the Old Testament was written- so unlike all the accounts of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses written in beautiful poetry, and with all its bloodthirsty stories of war and conquest so unlike the deep thoughts, so calmly expressed, of the great philosophers like Plato. They would laugh at their Christian friends “Do you mean to tell me you actually believe all that rubbish, how can you? Just a load of Bedouins killing each other!” In fact, St Augustine himself couldn’t bring himself to become a Catholic until he heard the sermons in Milan of St Ambrose, explaining just how to approach and understand the Old Testament. So let’s look at today’s reading.
It is set in the middle of the fourth century BC when the Jews had returned from their long captivity in Babylon and were gradually rebuilding their national life and their identity as God’s holy people. Ezra was the man in charge, and he was particularly anxious that the people should reacquaint themselves with the scriptures, and with God’s Law which they contained- how else would they ever get the country off to a good start again? His right hand man in all this was Nehemiah, and today’s reading comes from his memoirs. It describes the scene at one of the great gatherings of the people that Ezra and the clergy would organise, at which all the scriptures were read. Look how the people react- they know that the scriptures are the presence of God in their midst, they know that they are hearing the Word of God addressed to them, that is why they immediately take up the posture of worship – they cry out “Amen, amen!” and they “bowed down….and prostrated themselves before the Lord”. And as well as just reading it out, we see that Ezra preaches on the Word of God, “translating and giving the sense so that the people understood what was read”. This is what we have to do at Mass every Sunday isn’t it- clergy and readers, we have to read you the scriptures so that it makes sense and you understand! A most important task, because let’s face it, how many of us have a Bible at home, and if we do how many of us open it? And of course opening it is a daunting thing in itself, it’s a bit like opening a phone book or an encyclopaedia- you’ve got to know what you are looking for and where to go. (I recommend as a user-friendly way of becoming familiar with the word of God to use one of the monthly booklets of daily readings that we have in our shop!)
Of course as they sat there –or lay there- hearing the scriptures, it didn’t make such comfortable reading to these newly returned Jews –as the demands that God was making of them sank in, as they began to grasp all the implications of the high expectations that God had of them, they felt a bit crestfallen- “they were in tears as they listened to the words of the Law”. Well, that’s not entirely a bad thing, you know- at least it meant they were taking it seriously, not just shrugging it all off as beyond them, the unrealistic demands of religion. You know what I mean! But Nehemiah encourages them and tells them that actually, although it is always an awesome, rather sobering experience to put ourselves in the presence of God and to reflect on the shortcomings of our lives contrasted to the hopes he has for each of us, nevertheless putting ourselves in this closeness to God is and can only be a source of joy. Nehemiah tells them to enjoy life- hey, it’s party time! “Go eat the fat, drink the sweet wine!” – and to share their happiness with the less fortunate- “send a portion to the man who has nothing”. It’s all there, isn’t it, our understanding not only of the presence of God in the scriptures, but even a hint of the eucharist to come in the distant future. We who come to church today, we are not unlike those Jews of Nehemiah’s time: they were returning to their faith, trying to pick up their old ways of religious practice, wanting to get it right, and in a way we are always returning aren’t we? We come to mass and as we recollect ourselves in a moment’s prayer we know our feet have strayed a bit since we were last in our pew, there have been a few things we’re uneasy about, a few moments we’d rather not dwell on – we are all always returning! We return, we show up again Sunday by Sunday, and we put ourselves once more in the presence of God- in the Tabernacle, in the Scriptures- and it is, of course it is, partly a source of sadness to us, as our conscience gives us a bit of a kick, that is why every Mass commences with the Confiteor, I confess… But the joy is greater than the sorrow, isn’t it, the joy that invades our hearts as we recognise Our Lord in our midst and know that we are in the right place, where we should be, close to the One who looks on us with eyes of welcome, of understanding and of love- he will put things right for us if we let him, for as Nehemiah knew well “the joy of the Lord is (y)our stronghold”.
Let us follow the advice in this ancient text this morning- we reverence the Word of God that we hear, for it is the living communication of the living God, addressed to us today; we take its message to our hearts; we are honest enough with ourselves to know that there is much in our lives to regret, but such is our trust in God and his love for us we rejoice. Let us go from this Mass refreshed by the presence of the Lord in his Word and in his Sacred Body – let us “eat the fat and drink the sweet wine” and let our joy in the Lord overflow into care for those we see around us who are in need- let us “send a portion to the man who has nothing prepared ready”, “for this day is sacred to our Lord”. Amen.
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