Homily for Seventh Sunday of the Year 20 February 2011
Today we continue our way through the compendium of Jesus’s teachings that we call the Sermon on the Mount. Today’s Gospel comes at the end of a passage in which Our Lord is explaining that the commandments of the Jewish law, good as they stand of course, have got to be considered and followed through in all their implications. So just before todays’ Gospel we have the bit about “you know ‘you shall not kill’ but I say ‘don’t get angry either’” and “you know it says ‘you shall not commit adultery’ but I say ‘if you are lusting after a woman, that’s just as bad’”. In other words, what we have here is Jesus saying that sin is not just about our actions- killing someone or sleeping with them- but about what is going on in our minds, because that is where all sin starts, with our unguarded, unchecked thoughts. Once we let all sorts of wrong thoughts romp around in our minds, we are bringing acting those thoughts out all the closer! So be careful what you think about! And so to today’s Gospel, which looks at first glance as if it is about that very common human failing, the desire for retaliation- getting our own back on the people who do us wrong- which seems such a natural reaction in us.
Jesus reminds us his hearers that the Jewish law- we find it in Deuteronomy 19- states “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. How barbaric and bloodthirsty that sounds! In fact this was really an attempt by the Jews to bring a sense of balance to the seeking of revenge; this idea of being satisfied with like for like was brought in, in common with many other law codes of the ancient world, to bring a halt to the momentum of revenge, to vendettas that could go on and on. To begin with there was a desire for endless revenge: you remember how in Genesis this growth in violence so saddens God that he thinks of destroying mankind once and for all in the flood. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, gloats at having killed a man for striking him and wants to go on and on: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold”. (Gen 4 xxiv). The Jews even before Our Lord’s time had moved on from “an eye for an eye” to what is called the Silver Rule, of Rabbi Hillel, which was basically “don’t do anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want them to do to you”, which effectively ruled out killing them or knocking their eye out. We actually find this in the Bible too, in the book of Tobit, which was written probably about 200 years before Our Lord’s time. Tobit is sending his son Tobias off on a mission and gives him a lot of good advice, including this: “And what you hate, do not do to anyone” (Tob 4 xv). That is good advice of course, but still is a negative thing, it’s about what not to do. Our Lord is going to improve on this in two further steps. There is the so-called Golden Rule, coming up a bit later on in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7 xii), something much more positive! And then here, the greatest refinement of all in our way of dealing with our fellow human beings when they mess us around: “But I say this to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.
Why have we got to do this annoying and unnatural thing? Well, the reason is simply this: we are created in the first place in the image and likeness of God and we have got to become – this is the essence of the Christian life we are all trying to lead- we have got to become bit by bit more like God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. And that means we can’t hate or punish anybody, because those are not things that God does. We sometimes wish he did, we’d quite like to see Mrs So-and-so next door get struck by lightning, after all, she deserves it the way she goes on, and surely God must hate that mob who burnt a church down the other day…. But God is the Creator of all humanity and loves all of his creation, loves all of us human beings unconditionally, indeed we can say loves us indiscriminately. How does Our Lord put it? “He causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike”.
And that is a huge problem for us, because it offends us- in fact I think we often experience this impartiality of God as a kind of injustice. We want God to be on our side as indeed he is, but the thing is, that doesn’t stop him being on other people’s side too, because they, whoever they are, are also his children, whether they know it or like it or accept it or not. The Jews, even though in their first centuries they were often tempted to talk about God as their very own, the God of Israel and so on, even they were aware- if only fleetingly sometimes- that there was more to God than that, that he was everybody’s God. There is an early hint of this when Joshua is planning his great attack on Jericho as part of the conquest of the Promised Land. He has a vision of God, who appears to him as a man holding a drawn sword. As the Jerusalem Bible has it: “And Joshua walked towards him and said to him ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied ‘On neither side’. ” (Josh 5 xiv) There you have it spelt out: ‘On neither side’. The readings we have had during this week from the Old Testament have said the same thing: we had Deuteronomy the other day, where God says “You must be impartial” (Deut 1 xvii NJB) and today in Leviticus “You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart….you must not exact vengeance nor must you bear a grudge”.
When it comes to getting to grips with the impartiality of God, this God who sends his rain on everybody regardless, we have to admit we baulk at it. But there it is for us in Scripture in the clearest terms- whose side is God on? “On neither side”. We must try as we grow in our Christian life, as we grow into the person God wants us to be, that person with godlike qualities, that person who has something of the divine about him or her, to acquire something of this impartiality, for we have as our aim “to be perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect”. Dear Jesus, help us to practise in our own lives that impartiality of our heavenly Father, who loves all his creatures with even-handed love; take from our hearts the grudges that we nurture there, the prejudices that form so easily and firmly in our minds; give us instead the desire to be perfect even as our heavenly father is perfect. Amen.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
S
Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 30 January 2011
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Holy Family 26 December 2010
Homily for Holy Family 26 December 2010
Dear Friends, I know this is the feast of the Holy Family, but I am not going to talk to you about the wonders of family life, I am sure you get tired of clergy talking to you about things of which they can only have a limited experience, and I have no desire to draw on my own family story for material, as it bores me let alone anyone else. No, I prefer to talk to you about something I do know about, and that is Scripture, and I know you share with me an enthusiasm for these sacred texts.
Last week we were looking at how Matthew, writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, uses the Old Testament again and again to get his message about Jesus across, sometimes using direct quotations and sometimes just dropping hints for us to pick up. We saw how he compared the birth of Our Lord to the start of a new age, of a new creation, and how the Spirit moved on the waters at the dawn of time in the Genesis account and how the same Spirit moved in Our Lady’s womb at the dawn of the new era of salvation that Jesus was bringing in. We looked at the parallels that Matthew was hoping we would draw between the work of the Spirit as shown in the Old Testament and the work of the Spirit in the coming of Christ at Christmas.
Today I want to reflect with you on what Matthew is saying about Jesus in this account we have just heard of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Now the mere mention of Egypt has us all thinking straightaway, doesn’t it, of that long period of slavery that the Israelites endured in Egypt, and how they were finally led out of Egypt to a new life in the Promised Land, how, under the guidance of Moses, they passed from slavery to liberation and formed a new people, bound together under the Covenant, the rules as it were of the game, the great contract between God and his chosen people. Well, that is of course exactly what Matthew wants us to think. He is comparing here Jesus and Moses. And there is a parallel we can see at once with this whole business of the child being in grave danger – you remember how when Moses was born, there was an order too, given by the Pharaoh, to kill the male children under a certain age, and how Moses managed to escape, in the famous basket in the bulrushes. Here another king, Herod, has given another fatwa, and Jesus manages to escape, this time by flight, flight to Egypt. The angel tells Joseph “Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt”. The very wording of that is interesting, because it doesn’t say “Take your son and your wife”, it says “the child and his mother”. I point this out because we can see in this careful use of words by the evangelist that he knows and wants to be sure we know that Joseph is not the natural father, that Mary was a virgin who conceived her son Our Lord by the Holy Spirit. And so Matthew has the Holy Family go to Egypt. This presents one huge problem for anyone who knows their Bible, because it is not only not mentioned by Luke, the other evangelist who gives us an account of the birth of Jesus (Mark and John don’t bother), but it is very hard to fit in with the way Luke describes events after the birth of Jesus, when they just go quietly back to Nazareth. We shall never know the exact truth of what really did happen, but we can know the truth, because each gospel writer is telling us the truth about Our Lord and using whatever seemed like the best way of getting it across to us. I am hesitant about dismissing this journey of the Holy Family to Egypt as a fabrication for two main reasons. One is, there was for at least two hundred years after the resurrection a persistent rumour that Jesus had lived in Egypt- this crops up a lot in Jewish writings, Jews trying to discredit Jesus would regularly say he was not the Messiah, he was only a magician, in other words his miracles were just tricks, and where did he learn his magic? he learnt it as a young man when he was a migrant worker in Egypt. So there seems to have been some kind of memory, even among his enemies, that Egypt came into the story somewhere. The other reason I have for believing it, is the constant tradition of the ancient Coptic Church, of the Christians of Egypt, evangelised from the outset by the apostle Mark and for the first centuries of the Church’s history a powerhouse of theology and sacred learning particularly at the School of Alexandria. You know I was in Cairo this year, and visited many of the Coptic churches there- one in five Egyptians is a Copt, and I can tell you that they are a faithful people, living for hundreds of years under every form of discrimination and still second class citizens in their own country. They have shed their blood for Christ in every generation and they deserve our respect. Anyway, they are extremely proud that Our Lord and his holy Mother lived in their country, and they can show you the spot where they rested on their journey, in what is now the crypt of a beautiful church, and they have a long tradition of icons and spirituality flowing from this sojourn of the holy Family in their exile. This hasn’t come from a myth.
Mary and Joseph stay in Egypt, as refugees, until it is safe for them to go back. And Matthew gets a quote in here, from the prophet Hosea (Hos 11 i): “I called my son out of Egypt”. The full quotation is “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”. Hosea thinks God is saying, when the Israelites were still a newish people, only a few generations of them, I loved them and I brought them out of Egypt. “My son” for Hosea means the whole people of Israel, they are all God’s sons, God’s children- just as we often call ourselves God’s children- but we know don’t we that there is a difference when we call ourselves sons and daughters of God and when we speak of Jesus as the Son of God. And here Matthew uses this quotation because it can have those two meanings- son with a small s and Son with a capital S. In the olden days God did bring his sons and daughters, the Children of Israel, out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised Land, and now, with Jesus, who is the Son of God so God can really say of him “my son”, (this is Matthew’s first hint of that title) God is bringing him out of Egypt, so that we who are joined to Christ by our Baptism and are part of his Body and sharers in his life, which means of course sharers in his experiences, we who are Christians, we too can be brought out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of the dependence on our bad habits and the whole slavery of sin and be liberated by him for life as a free man, a free woman, in charge of our own destiny and finally able to fulfil our true potential. Only we know what our own private Egypt is, what we are enslaved to, where life has led us and imprisoned us. But the good news is, God has brought his son out of Egypt, and if we are caught up in the life of that son by our Christian faith and our involvement in the sacramental life of the Church that keeps us close to him, then we too will be coming out of Egypt. And we need never go back there!
I suppose before we finish with this passage, we should think for a moment about how the Israelites came to be in Egypt in the first place. It was of course because of another Joseph, you remember how he was sold into slavery by his brothers and ended up working for the pharaoh, and how when there was a famine in Canaan he sent for his father Jacob and brought him and all his family to Egypt. In Genesis 46:4 God says to Jacob “I shall go down with you to Egypt and I shall bring you back again”. Jacob’s wife was Rachel, and later in the same chapter 2 of today’s Gospel when we come to the massacre of the Holy Innocents Matthew refers to Rachel, quoting what Jeremiah says “Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be consoled” (Mt 2 xviii). That’s another clue that we are on right track to be thinking about Jacob here too. Jacob of course died in Egypt, but he returned to the Promised Land in his descendants when Moses led them home years and years later. We too have our famine, there is hunger in our world, not just hunger for food in many parts of the world, real and scandalous though that is, but a deeper hunger, especially here in the West, a hunger for God, for the certainties of Faith, for some absolute truths in the shifting sands of the do-what-you-want and believe-what-you-like culture in which we live. Matthew is aware of this famine of the spirit, and he is trying to remind us here that God will find us in our famine and feed us, and that he will bring us back from the place where we experience famine and loss and emptiness of spirit to our own Promised Land, which we can reach by following where Our Lord has led, Our Lord, like another Moses, will lead us if we let him, from slavery to freedom, from our old ways, from the prison of self and self-centred life, to the new life that we can share with Christ.
And so in this passage this morning we can see many references in this flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, we can see some of the ideas that the evangelist wants to raise in the minds of his hearers, those who listen and know the scriptures as he did. Lord Jesus, bring us with you out of Egypt, out of the prison of our own personal Egypt, into the promised Land of freedom, deliver us- lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Dear God, call your sons and daughters out of Egypt! Amen.
Dear Friends, I know this is the feast of the Holy Family, but I am not going to talk to you about the wonders of family life, I am sure you get tired of clergy talking to you about things of which they can only have a limited experience, and I have no desire to draw on my own family story for material, as it bores me let alone anyone else. No, I prefer to talk to you about something I do know about, and that is Scripture, and I know you share with me an enthusiasm for these sacred texts.
Last week we were looking at how Matthew, writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, uses the Old Testament again and again to get his message about Jesus across, sometimes using direct quotations and sometimes just dropping hints for us to pick up. We saw how he compared the birth of Our Lord to the start of a new age, of a new creation, and how the Spirit moved on the waters at the dawn of time in the Genesis account and how the same Spirit moved in Our Lady’s womb at the dawn of the new era of salvation that Jesus was bringing in. We looked at the parallels that Matthew was hoping we would draw between the work of the Spirit as shown in the Old Testament and the work of the Spirit in the coming of Christ at Christmas.
Today I want to reflect with you on what Matthew is saying about Jesus in this account we have just heard of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Now the mere mention of Egypt has us all thinking straightaway, doesn’t it, of that long period of slavery that the Israelites endured in Egypt, and how they were finally led out of Egypt to a new life in the Promised Land, how, under the guidance of Moses, they passed from slavery to liberation and formed a new people, bound together under the Covenant, the rules as it were of the game, the great contract between God and his chosen people. Well, that is of course exactly what Matthew wants us to think. He is comparing here Jesus and Moses. And there is a parallel we can see at once with this whole business of the child being in grave danger – you remember how when Moses was born, there was an order too, given by the Pharaoh, to kill the male children under a certain age, and how Moses managed to escape, in the famous basket in the bulrushes. Here another king, Herod, has given another fatwa, and Jesus manages to escape, this time by flight, flight to Egypt. The angel tells Joseph “Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt”. The very wording of that is interesting, because it doesn’t say “Take your son and your wife”, it says “the child and his mother”. I point this out because we can see in this careful use of words by the evangelist that he knows and wants to be sure we know that Joseph is not the natural father, that Mary was a virgin who conceived her son Our Lord by the Holy Spirit. And so Matthew has the Holy Family go to Egypt. This presents one huge problem for anyone who knows their Bible, because it is not only not mentioned by Luke, the other evangelist who gives us an account of the birth of Jesus (Mark and John don’t bother), but it is very hard to fit in with the way Luke describes events after the birth of Jesus, when they just go quietly back to Nazareth. We shall never know the exact truth of what really did happen, but we can know the truth, because each gospel writer is telling us the truth about Our Lord and using whatever seemed like the best way of getting it across to us. I am hesitant about dismissing this journey of the Holy Family to Egypt as a fabrication for two main reasons. One is, there was for at least two hundred years after the resurrection a persistent rumour that Jesus had lived in Egypt- this crops up a lot in Jewish writings, Jews trying to discredit Jesus would regularly say he was not the Messiah, he was only a magician, in other words his miracles were just tricks, and where did he learn his magic? he learnt it as a young man when he was a migrant worker in Egypt. So there seems to have been some kind of memory, even among his enemies, that Egypt came into the story somewhere. The other reason I have for believing it, is the constant tradition of the ancient Coptic Church, of the Christians of Egypt, evangelised from the outset by the apostle Mark and for the first centuries of the Church’s history a powerhouse of theology and sacred learning particularly at the School of Alexandria. You know I was in Cairo this year, and visited many of the Coptic churches there- one in five Egyptians is a Copt, and I can tell you that they are a faithful people, living for hundreds of years under every form of discrimination and still second class citizens in their own country. They have shed their blood for Christ in every generation and they deserve our respect. Anyway, they are extremely proud that Our Lord and his holy Mother lived in their country, and they can show you the spot where they rested on their journey, in what is now the crypt of a beautiful church, and they have a long tradition of icons and spirituality flowing from this sojourn of the holy Family in their exile. This hasn’t come from a myth.
Mary and Joseph stay in Egypt, as refugees, until it is safe for them to go back. And Matthew gets a quote in here, from the prophet Hosea (Hos 11 i): “I called my son out of Egypt”. The full quotation is “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”. Hosea thinks God is saying, when the Israelites were still a newish people, only a few generations of them, I loved them and I brought them out of Egypt. “My son” for Hosea means the whole people of Israel, they are all God’s sons, God’s children- just as we often call ourselves God’s children- but we know don’t we that there is a difference when we call ourselves sons and daughters of God and when we speak of Jesus as the Son of God. And here Matthew uses this quotation because it can have those two meanings- son with a small s and Son with a capital S. In the olden days God did bring his sons and daughters, the Children of Israel, out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised Land, and now, with Jesus, who is the Son of God so God can really say of him “my son”, (this is Matthew’s first hint of that title) God is bringing him out of Egypt, so that we who are joined to Christ by our Baptism and are part of his Body and sharers in his life, which means of course sharers in his experiences, we who are Christians, we too can be brought out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of the dependence on our bad habits and the whole slavery of sin and be liberated by him for life as a free man, a free woman, in charge of our own destiny and finally able to fulfil our true potential. Only we know what our own private Egypt is, what we are enslaved to, where life has led us and imprisoned us. But the good news is, God has brought his son out of Egypt, and if we are caught up in the life of that son by our Christian faith and our involvement in the sacramental life of the Church that keeps us close to him, then we too will be coming out of Egypt. And we need never go back there!
I suppose before we finish with this passage, we should think for a moment about how the Israelites came to be in Egypt in the first place. It was of course because of another Joseph, you remember how he was sold into slavery by his brothers and ended up working for the pharaoh, and how when there was a famine in Canaan he sent for his father Jacob and brought him and all his family to Egypt. In Genesis 46:4 God says to Jacob “I shall go down with you to Egypt and I shall bring you back again”. Jacob’s wife was Rachel, and later in the same chapter 2 of today’s Gospel when we come to the massacre of the Holy Innocents Matthew refers to Rachel, quoting what Jeremiah says “Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be consoled” (Mt 2 xviii). That’s another clue that we are on right track to be thinking about Jacob here too. Jacob of course died in Egypt, but he returned to the Promised Land in his descendants when Moses led them home years and years later. We too have our famine, there is hunger in our world, not just hunger for food in many parts of the world, real and scandalous though that is, but a deeper hunger, especially here in the West, a hunger for God, for the certainties of Faith, for some absolute truths in the shifting sands of the do-what-you-want and believe-what-you-like culture in which we live. Matthew is aware of this famine of the spirit, and he is trying to remind us here that God will find us in our famine and feed us, and that he will bring us back from the place where we experience famine and loss and emptiness of spirit to our own Promised Land, which we can reach by following where Our Lord has led, Our Lord, like another Moses, will lead us if we let him, from slavery to freedom, from our old ways, from the prison of self and self-centred life, to the new life that we can share with Christ.
And so in this passage this morning we can see many references in this flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, we can see some of the ideas that the evangelist wants to raise in the minds of his hearers, those who listen and know the scriptures as he did. Lord Jesus, bring us with you out of Egypt, out of the prison of our own personal Egypt, into the promised Land of freedom, deliver us- lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Dear God, call your sons and daughters out of Egypt! Amen.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Advent IV 2010
Homily for Advent IV 19 December 2010
These beautiful gospel readings that we have at Christmas time are probably the best known Biblical passages of all, and they are so familiar to us as we hear them again year after year that if we are not careful they pass over our heads like so much background music, like the carols playing in the shops that no one actually listens to – it is quite difficult for us to look at these texts and try to imagine how they would sound to us if we were hearing them for the first time.
Look at today’s Gospel, from Matthew. What we have in Matthew’s Gospel, all scholars would agree, is the very first attempt by someone in the Christian community to write down something about the birth of Our Lord, about how and why God the Son came into our world as a human being. Mark’s Gospel you know is a bit older, but Mark doesn’t mention anything at all about how Jesus was born, he just barges straight in with the adult Jesus getting baptised and beginning his ministry. But Matthew wants to tell us about the birth and infancy of Our Lord, and he says “this is how Jesus Christ came to be born”. And straightaway we have a mention of the Holy Spirit- Mary “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit”. And then a few lines later on, the angel tells Joseph that “she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit”. The evangelist is determined to tell us that right from the start there is the action of the Spirit, of the Spirit of God, in this new state of affairs that is the Incarnation. Now of course as you know Matthew was writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, of people who knew the scriptures- that is why he is constantly quoting verses of the Old Testament to prove his points. And here, with these references to the Holy Spirit, we can see what he is trying to remind his audience of – all the places in the Old Testament where the Spirit is involved, so that they can draw the parallels for themselves.
Let’s consider the main examples. First of all, we go to Genesis 1 and 2, the two creation stories. Here, at the very outset of creation, “when the earth was without form and void” we read (Gen 1 ii) that “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”. And as it was with the first creation, so it is with the new creation- at the very start, at the moment of the conception of Our Lord the Spirit of God was moving in Our Lady’s womb. Genesis 2 shows us God forming Adam like a potter moulding the clay, and we see that Adam comes alive when God breathes into his nostrils- a sign in itself of great intimacy- “the breath of life” (Gen 2vii). And you may remember that in Hebrew breath and spirit are the same word, ruach, and so this could just as easily be translated “God breathed into his nostrils the Spirit of life”. Again, you get the point: for the first human being formed God needed to give it his Spirit to give it life, and now, for this new human being, this Second Adam as St Paul likes to call Jesus, it is formed in the womb of Our Lady and given life there by God’s breath of life, the Spirit of Life. What is happening with Our Lord’s birth and entry into our world as a human being is the start of a new creation, of a new way of being human, and of a new way of us relating as humans to God. The breath of God is the creating force now as before, as one of the psalms reminds us: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their array” (Ps 33vi) In both creations, old and new, the Holy Spirit is at work!
This new creation inaugurated by the birth of Our Lord is desperately needed by our fallen confused world that has so utterly lost its way, that it is like the Israelites wandering round and round in the desert of Sinai when all the time the Promised Land was only a few hours’ drive away (well, you know what I mean). The desert is an arid place of death and decay, and that brings me to the next reference to the Spirit- I turn now to Ezekiel and his vision – you remember that valley, full of dry bones, and many of you will know the song too! (I won’t sing it, relax.) The valley is full of the bones, the dry bones, of many many dead men and the Spirit asks Ezekiel the question “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezek 37 iii) The story goes on: “Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live” (ix) and “the breath came into them and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host” (x.) Again, remember that for breath we can also put spirit- “come from the four winds, o Spirit, and breathe upon these…. that they may live”. Yes, humanity, dead in its awareness of God, can be brought back to life, and the people that Our Lord will call to be part of this new worldview, this new creation, will be indeed “an exceedingly great host”. And the action of the Spirit is how this will happen.
Just one more example, from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah also, like Ezekiel, talks of dry valleys, desperately in need of irrigation if they are ever to be fruitful. For him the Spirit of God is like some wonderful refreshing rain, that the parched earth will drink up and that will cause all sorts of seeds to germinate and spring up- you know how the desert can bloom. Isaiah hears God saying “I shall pour out water on the thirsty soil and streams on the dry land. I shall pour out my Spirit on your descendants, my blessing on your offspring, and they will spring up among the grass like willows on the banks of a stream” (Is 44 iii-iv) The world is thirsty for the good news of Jesus Christ and if only human beings will receive the message of salvation then God will pour out his Spirit upon them, irrigate their lives and then who knows what will start to grow, what green shoots will spring up, what will change, both for individuals and for society as a whole?
This is, I feel sure, the sort of train of thought that the evangelist wanted to start up in those first readers of his Gospel, of the passage we have heard today- these are the references he hoped we would be picking up. The birth of Our Lord is almost upon us, only a week to go. As we prepare to greet his birth, let us ask the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts as he did into Mary’s womb, and engender there a new person, a new me, a new improved me, a me that is truly and fully alive. Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe upon us that we may live. Amen.
These beautiful gospel readings that we have at Christmas time are probably the best known Biblical passages of all, and they are so familiar to us as we hear them again year after year that if we are not careful they pass over our heads like so much background music, like the carols playing in the shops that no one actually listens to – it is quite difficult for us to look at these texts and try to imagine how they would sound to us if we were hearing them for the first time.
Look at today’s Gospel, from Matthew. What we have in Matthew’s Gospel, all scholars would agree, is the very first attempt by someone in the Christian community to write down something about the birth of Our Lord, about how and why God the Son came into our world as a human being. Mark’s Gospel you know is a bit older, but Mark doesn’t mention anything at all about how Jesus was born, he just barges straight in with the adult Jesus getting baptised and beginning his ministry. But Matthew wants to tell us about the birth and infancy of Our Lord, and he says “this is how Jesus Christ came to be born”. And straightaway we have a mention of the Holy Spirit- Mary “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit”. And then a few lines later on, the angel tells Joseph that “she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit”. The evangelist is determined to tell us that right from the start there is the action of the Spirit, of the Spirit of God, in this new state of affairs that is the Incarnation. Now of course as you know Matthew was writing primarily for an audience of Jewish Christians, of people who knew the scriptures- that is why he is constantly quoting verses of the Old Testament to prove his points. And here, with these references to the Holy Spirit, we can see what he is trying to remind his audience of – all the places in the Old Testament where the Spirit is involved, so that they can draw the parallels for themselves.
Let’s consider the main examples. First of all, we go to Genesis 1 and 2, the two creation stories. Here, at the very outset of creation, “when the earth was without form and void” we read (Gen 1 ii) that “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”. And as it was with the first creation, so it is with the new creation- at the very start, at the moment of the conception of Our Lord the Spirit of God was moving in Our Lady’s womb. Genesis 2 shows us God forming Adam like a potter moulding the clay, and we see that Adam comes alive when God breathes into his nostrils- a sign in itself of great intimacy- “the breath of life” (Gen 2vii). And you may remember that in Hebrew breath and spirit are the same word, ruach, and so this could just as easily be translated “God breathed into his nostrils the Spirit of life”. Again, you get the point: for the first human being formed God needed to give it his Spirit to give it life, and now, for this new human being, this Second Adam as St Paul likes to call Jesus, it is formed in the womb of Our Lady and given life there by God’s breath of life, the Spirit of Life. What is happening with Our Lord’s birth and entry into our world as a human being is the start of a new creation, of a new way of being human, and of a new way of us relating as humans to God. The breath of God is the creating force now as before, as one of the psalms reminds us: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their array” (Ps 33vi) In both creations, old and new, the Holy Spirit is at work!
This new creation inaugurated by the birth of Our Lord is desperately needed by our fallen confused world that has so utterly lost its way, that it is like the Israelites wandering round and round in the desert of Sinai when all the time the Promised Land was only a few hours’ drive away (well, you know what I mean). The desert is an arid place of death and decay, and that brings me to the next reference to the Spirit- I turn now to Ezekiel and his vision – you remember that valley, full of dry bones, and many of you will know the song too! (I won’t sing it, relax.) The valley is full of the bones, the dry bones, of many many dead men and the Spirit asks Ezekiel the question “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezek 37 iii) The story goes on: “Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live” (ix) and “the breath came into them and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host” (x.) Again, remember that for breath we can also put spirit- “come from the four winds, o Spirit, and breathe upon these…. that they may live”. Yes, humanity, dead in its awareness of God, can be brought back to life, and the people that Our Lord will call to be part of this new worldview, this new creation, will be indeed “an exceedingly great host”. And the action of the Spirit is how this will happen.
Just one more example, from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah also, like Ezekiel, talks of dry valleys, desperately in need of irrigation if they are ever to be fruitful. For him the Spirit of God is like some wonderful refreshing rain, that the parched earth will drink up and that will cause all sorts of seeds to germinate and spring up- you know how the desert can bloom. Isaiah hears God saying “I shall pour out water on the thirsty soil and streams on the dry land. I shall pour out my Spirit on your descendants, my blessing on your offspring, and they will spring up among the grass like willows on the banks of a stream” (Is 44 iii-iv) The world is thirsty for the good news of Jesus Christ and if only human beings will receive the message of salvation then God will pour out his Spirit upon them, irrigate their lives and then who knows what will start to grow, what green shoots will spring up, what will change, both for individuals and for society as a whole?
This is, I feel sure, the sort of train of thought that the evangelist wanted to start up in those first readers of his Gospel, of the passage we have heard today- these are the references he hoped we would be picking up. The birth of Our Lord is almost upon us, only a week to go. As we prepare to greet his birth, let us ask the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts as he did into Mary’s womb, and engender there a new person, a new me, a new improved me, a me that is truly and fully alive. Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe upon us that we may live. Amen.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
29th Sunday of the Year 17 October 2010
Homily for 29th Sunday in ordinary time 17 October 2010
We continue our journey through St Luke’s Gospel with another one of his rather strange parables, you remember the really confusing one two weeks ago about the so-called dishonest steward, this time we have a story about a dishonest judge. And this unjust judge is compared to God himself! It has to be said that some of Luke’s stories are not that straightforward! Some, like last week’s story about the ten lepers, all cured but only one saying thank you, are easy enough for us to understand, but others have awkward bits that are hard to explain.
This story seems to be about a widow trying to get justice. We know that one of the main characteristics of Luke’s Gospel is its preoccupation with the poor, the needy, the outcasts of society, those who don’t fit in. St Luke emphasises again and again in his Gospel that these are just the people Our Lord has come into the world to save, and he shows Our Lord constantly finding ways to demonstrate the value that such people have- that is why Our Lord mixes with them, he is mixing with the outcasts, the out crowd, to show us and them that they are in fact very much the in crowd and even if they don’t seem to fit in very well to society, or our view of it, they fit or should fit perfectly into his view of society, in other words, the Church. This is why we have a widow in this parable. Widows were at best an awkward presence in Jewish society, often scorned by their late husband’s family and often condemned to live on charity. All through the Old Testament we find examples of widows to whom justice is denied, who are disgraced just by being a widow and who have no rights, no chance. The first Christians were always anxious to reverse this, hence all the injunctions in the New Testament about looking after widows and orphans. So the widow is there as an example of someone at a disadvantage in the world, someone with no privileges and no support. And of course she is there in the story as an example of constancy in prayer, an example for all Christians, to be constant in prayer. Of course, if you’re in trouble and life is hard, you are more likely to be saying your prayers every day, aren’t you- when our life is beset with problems, we feel our need for God and his loving help all the more keenly. We know, when our troubles fall thick and fast upon us, that we can’t manage alone, and we call then upon God all the more urgently, to get us through. How different when everything is a bed of roses and we are coasting merrily along- then, like last week’s lepers, very few of us keep the prayers going!
And then there is this wretched judge, who can’t be bothered to help her at first but then gives in because he just knows she’s going to go on nag nag nag until she drives him up the wall. Does this remind you of another parable of Luke’s? Do you remember the man whose friend arrives at midnight and he goes and knocks on the neighbours’ door to borrow some food? It comes in Chapter 11, straight after the version of the Lord’s Prayer that Luke gives us, and Jesus comments on the neighbour in the story “though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs” (Lk 11 viii). Another lesson to drive home the importance of being constant in prayer! But back to this unjust judge! The idea of God as Judge is of course found right across the Old Testament but I wonder if this parable is a conscious echo of a passage in the book of Sirach – a writer as close to Jesus’s own time as Newman is to us. I refer to chapter 35; listen to how it fits in: “the Lord is the judge, and with him is no partiality. He will not show partiality in the case of a poor man and he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against him who has caused them to fall?” (Sir 35 xii-xv).
But I think the best way to understand this story is to look at its context in Luke’s Gospel, to see where it stands. After last week’s story of the ungrateful lepers, chapter 17 goes on at great length about the end of the world, how unexpected the Return of Our Lord will be and how it will be a time of suffering and of decision - Luke has Jesus comparing these end times to the days of Noah and of Lot, and insisting that there must be no turning back, no dithering – “let him who is on then housetop with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back” (Lk 17 xxxi) That is the light in which we must read today’s Gospel about this corrupt judge and this nagging woman; we are in the end times, the world will come to its end one day we know not when or how, but we must live with that sense of urgency that goes with being on red alert- we should be keeping our prayers going, making sure we frequent the sacraments, getting our priorities right, deciding once and for all what matters and what doesn’t matter in our lives, and above all keeping our confidence up that God will look after us. As Our Lord says in this text “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them!” Of course that is why this story ends with Jesus asking the question about faith- when all this happens, when Our Lord, the Son of Man as he likes to call himself, comes to find us, what will he find? “Will he find any faith on earth?” Let us assure Our Lord this evening that when he comes to Lewisham tonight, when he arrives on our altar when the words of consecration turn bread and wine into his very Body and Blood, when he is here among us and we come close to his Presence at communion, let us assure him that he will find faith on earth, that we are among those who will never lose heart, who will cry to him in prayer day and night, who want to be his chosen, the chosen for whom God will see justice done. Amen
We continue our journey through St Luke’s Gospel with another one of his rather strange parables, you remember the really confusing one two weeks ago about the so-called dishonest steward, this time we have a story about a dishonest judge. And this unjust judge is compared to God himself! It has to be said that some of Luke’s stories are not that straightforward! Some, like last week’s story about the ten lepers, all cured but only one saying thank you, are easy enough for us to understand, but others have awkward bits that are hard to explain.
This story seems to be about a widow trying to get justice. We know that one of the main characteristics of Luke’s Gospel is its preoccupation with the poor, the needy, the outcasts of society, those who don’t fit in. St Luke emphasises again and again in his Gospel that these are just the people Our Lord has come into the world to save, and he shows Our Lord constantly finding ways to demonstrate the value that such people have- that is why Our Lord mixes with them, he is mixing with the outcasts, the out crowd, to show us and them that they are in fact very much the in crowd and even if they don’t seem to fit in very well to society, or our view of it, they fit or should fit perfectly into his view of society, in other words, the Church. This is why we have a widow in this parable. Widows were at best an awkward presence in Jewish society, often scorned by their late husband’s family and often condemned to live on charity. All through the Old Testament we find examples of widows to whom justice is denied, who are disgraced just by being a widow and who have no rights, no chance. The first Christians were always anxious to reverse this, hence all the injunctions in the New Testament about looking after widows and orphans. So the widow is there as an example of someone at a disadvantage in the world, someone with no privileges and no support. And of course she is there in the story as an example of constancy in prayer, an example for all Christians, to be constant in prayer. Of course, if you’re in trouble and life is hard, you are more likely to be saying your prayers every day, aren’t you- when our life is beset with problems, we feel our need for God and his loving help all the more keenly. We know, when our troubles fall thick and fast upon us, that we can’t manage alone, and we call then upon God all the more urgently, to get us through. How different when everything is a bed of roses and we are coasting merrily along- then, like last week’s lepers, very few of us keep the prayers going!
And then there is this wretched judge, who can’t be bothered to help her at first but then gives in because he just knows she’s going to go on nag nag nag until she drives him up the wall. Does this remind you of another parable of Luke’s? Do you remember the man whose friend arrives at midnight and he goes and knocks on the neighbours’ door to borrow some food? It comes in Chapter 11, straight after the version of the Lord’s Prayer that Luke gives us, and Jesus comments on the neighbour in the story “though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs” (Lk 11 viii). Another lesson to drive home the importance of being constant in prayer! But back to this unjust judge! The idea of God as Judge is of course found right across the Old Testament but I wonder if this parable is a conscious echo of a passage in the book of Sirach – a writer as close to Jesus’s own time as Newman is to us. I refer to chapter 35; listen to how it fits in: “the Lord is the judge, and with him is no partiality. He will not show partiality in the case of a poor man and he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against him who has caused them to fall?” (Sir 35 xii-xv).
But I think the best way to understand this story is to look at its context in Luke’s Gospel, to see where it stands. After last week’s story of the ungrateful lepers, chapter 17 goes on at great length about the end of the world, how unexpected the Return of Our Lord will be and how it will be a time of suffering and of decision - Luke has Jesus comparing these end times to the days of Noah and of Lot, and insisting that there must be no turning back, no dithering – “let him who is on then housetop with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back” (Lk 17 xxxi) That is the light in which we must read today’s Gospel about this corrupt judge and this nagging woman; we are in the end times, the world will come to its end one day we know not when or how, but we must live with that sense of urgency that goes with being on red alert- we should be keeping our prayers going, making sure we frequent the sacraments, getting our priorities right, deciding once and for all what matters and what doesn’t matter in our lives, and above all keeping our confidence up that God will look after us. As Our Lord says in this text “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them!” Of course that is why this story ends with Jesus asking the question about faith- when all this happens, when Our Lord, the Son of Man as he likes to call himself, comes to find us, what will he find? “Will he find any faith on earth?” Let us assure Our Lord this evening that when he comes to Lewisham tonight, when he arrives on our altar when the words of consecration turn bread and wine into his very Body and Blood, when he is here among us and we come close to his Presence at communion, let us assure him that he will find faith on earth, that we are among those who will never lose heart, who will cry to him in prayer day and night, who want to be his chosen, the chosen for whom God will see justice done. Amen
October Devotions
Homily for October Devotions Sunday 3 October 2010
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
sunday 19 september 2010
Homily for 25th Sunday in ordinary time year C 19 September 2010
Today’s Gospel is really such a strange story, I wonder if you found it rather confusing, rather odd – is it really recommending a bit of imaginative accounting, a bit of sharp practice, a bit of dishonesty, a bit of cheating, as the way to get on? And not just the way to get on, but also the way to win the approval of the master, who is presumably the Lord himself?
In the first centuries of the Church this parable, unique to Luke’s Gospel, except for the last verse 13, bewildered people too. In the early 5th century St Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, calls this story “a very difficult parable” and laments that “none of our treatises seem….to offer an adequate explanation”. And his contemporary St Augustine, after agonising over how it could be that Our Lord praises someone “who has acted deceitfully”, anxiously tells his congregation that although Our Lord commended the steward for making provision for the future, “nevertheless we are not to imitate him in all that he did”.
At first glance it does seem to be saying cheating can be quite a good idea, being smart, maybe a bit too smart, with money, and perhaps it doesn’t seem so jarring if we remember the same sort of worldly advice in the Old Testament, in those collections of good advice and reflection on the ways of the world that we call wisdom literature - the book of Proverbs comes to mind. And not only in the Old Testament, but the in New also – is this the kind of cleverness we can do with when we’re up against the hostile world? All this stuff about astuteness- “the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Lk 16 viii) Our Lord seems to be suggesting this in that famous verse in Matthew’s Gospel when he says “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10 xvi).
Actually I don’t think that is what this particular parable is about at all. It is certainly partly about money, that’s for sure, because it ends with the dictum we all know so well: “You cannot serve God and mammon” or as the translation we use at Mass has it: “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money” (Lk 16 xiii). This story comes at the start of a section of three chapters where the evangelist collects together several stories on the theme of riches, and the dangers they often provoke- money, and the trouble with it! Nothing wrong with money, especially if we’ve earnt it, and we all know what a difference it can make to have enough money to go round, or even, joy of joys, to have a bit left over at the end of the month to put away! But it’s when we start to think that money can solve everything, fill every gap, plug every hole in our lives, that’s the danger- or when we have so much of this world’s possessions that we feel completely cushioned from anything that could possibly go wrong- because then we can easily begin to forget God, and to forget that things in our life are actually in his control and not in ours! And being too fond of all the things we have accumulated around us thanks to our money, that can really hold us back too – later in chapter 18 we will have the rich young man who just can’t bring himself to part with anything, and so has to refuse Our Lord’s call. (Lk 18 xviii- xxx)
But there is more to this parable than money. What I really want to reflect with you about is this whole business of the changing of the amounts that the debtors owed. Now in Palestine in the time of Our Lord, there were many absentee landlords, rich people who owned estates, farms and so on, which they almost never visited; they would leave everything to do with their estate in the hands of an oikonomos, that is an agent, a manager or as the gospel calls him, a steward. These were not just servants but professional men- accountants really- who enjoyed considerable independence and could more or less do what they liked with their employers’ funds. They often lent out their employers’ property, land etc, for perhaps a number of years, and always of course with a commission built in for themselves, or with interest on the loan. Now the normal way of doing this all over the Mediterranean world at this time was to write out a bond and just mention the final total you owed, not splitting it up into the amount borrowed and the interest. So, what we have here in this parable is the steward deciding to rewrite the bonds of the people who are in debt to his master, rewriting them and subtracting his commission, the interest he was charging them for his own profit as the middleman. This is what lies behind this business of crossing out a hundred barrels of oil and writing fifty, or a hundred measures of wheat and writing eighty. The steward who has done all these transactions, not dishonest but just normal practice, is making sure that what he has done for others has not brought him any advantage himself. We are to do good, not for what we can get out of it, not for any tangible rewards here and now, but for an eternal reward, when as the Master in the parable says we will be welcomed “into the tents of eternity”. That is, I suggest, what Our Lord is trying to say to us in this parable: if we think of our own advantage all the time in whatever we’re doing, in our good deeds, in our attempts at the good life, if we keep thinking to ourselves “Yes, lovely, but what’s in it for me?” “Where’s the pay off?” “What am I getting out of all this being a good Catholic?” then we have got something terribly wrong. Our Christian life must not become a calculation- but one long act of love, one long demonstration of our love for God- and of course we know that real love is never calculating, it is just giving and forgiving. You remember that lovely prayer of St Ignatius: “to give and not to count the cost, to labour and not to look for any reward, save that of knowing that we do thy will….” Only then, when we have written ourselves and our own interest out of our good deeds, will we “win friends”, as the gospel has it, and they will be the friends that really matter- Our Lord and his Holy Mother- and we can be sure that they “will welcome (us) into the tents of eternity”. O Jesus, when we must leave this life and give an account of our stewardship of ourselves, help us to have lived our lives in such a way that we will find in you and your holy Mother and all the saints “some who will welcome (us) into their homes”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is really such a strange story, I wonder if you found it rather confusing, rather odd – is it really recommending a bit of imaginative accounting, a bit of sharp practice, a bit of dishonesty, a bit of cheating, as the way to get on? And not just the way to get on, but also the way to win the approval of the master, who is presumably the Lord himself?
In the first centuries of the Church this parable, unique to Luke’s Gospel, except for the last verse 13, bewildered people too. In the early 5th century St Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, calls this story “a very difficult parable” and laments that “none of our treatises seem….to offer an adequate explanation”. And his contemporary St Augustine, after agonising over how it could be that Our Lord praises someone “who has acted deceitfully”, anxiously tells his congregation that although Our Lord commended the steward for making provision for the future, “nevertheless we are not to imitate him in all that he did”.
At first glance it does seem to be saying cheating can be quite a good idea, being smart, maybe a bit too smart, with money, and perhaps it doesn’t seem so jarring if we remember the same sort of worldly advice in the Old Testament, in those collections of good advice and reflection on the ways of the world that we call wisdom literature - the book of Proverbs comes to mind. And not only in the Old Testament, but the in New also – is this the kind of cleverness we can do with when we’re up against the hostile world? All this stuff about astuteness- “the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Lk 16 viii) Our Lord seems to be suggesting this in that famous verse in Matthew’s Gospel when he says “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt 10 xvi).
Actually I don’t think that is what this particular parable is about at all. It is certainly partly about money, that’s for sure, because it ends with the dictum we all know so well: “You cannot serve God and mammon” or as the translation we use at Mass has it: “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money” (Lk 16 xiii). This story comes at the start of a section of three chapters where the evangelist collects together several stories on the theme of riches, and the dangers they often provoke- money, and the trouble with it! Nothing wrong with money, especially if we’ve earnt it, and we all know what a difference it can make to have enough money to go round, or even, joy of joys, to have a bit left over at the end of the month to put away! But it’s when we start to think that money can solve everything, fill every gap, plug every hole in our lives, that’s the danger- or when we have so much of this world’s possessions that we feel completely cushioned from anything that could possibly go wrong- because then we can easily begin to forget God, and to forget that things in our life are actually in his control and not in ours! And being too fond of all the things we have accumulated around us thanks to our money, that can really hold us back too – later in chapter 18 we will have the rich young man who just can’t bring himself to part with anything, and so has to refuse Our Lord’s call. (Lk 18 xviii- xxx)
But there is more to this parable than money. What I really want to reflect with you about is this whole business of the changing of the amounts that the debtors owed. Now in Palestine in the time of Our Lord, there were many absentee landlords, rich people who owned estates, farms and so on, which they almost never visited; they would leave everything to do with their estate in the hands of an oikonomos, that is an agent, a manager or as the gospel calls him, a steward. These were not just servants but professional men- accountants really- who enjoyed considerable independence and could more or less do what they liked with their employers’ funds. They often lent out their employers’ property, land etc, for perhaps a number of years, and always of course with a commission built in for themselves, or with interest on the loan. Now the normal way of doing this all over the Mediterranean world at this time was to write out a bond and just mention the final total you owed, not splitting it up into the amount borrowed and the interest. So, what we have here in this parable is the steward deciding to rewrite the bonds of the people who are in debt to his master, rewriting them and subtracting his commission, the interest he was charging them for his own profit as the middleman. This is what lies behind this business of crossing out a hundred barrels of oil and writing fifty, or a hundred measures of wheat and writing eighty. The steward who has done all these transactions, not dishonest but just normal practice, is making sure that what he has done for others has not brought him any advantage himself. We are to do good, not for what we can get out of it, not for any tangible rewards here and now, but for an eternal reward, when as the Master in the parable says we will be welcomed “into the tents of eternity”. That is, I suggest, what Our Lord is trying to say to us in this parable: if we think of our own advantage all the time in whatever we’re doing, in our good deeds, in our attempts at the good life, if we keep thinking to ourselves “Yes, lovely, but what’s in it for me?” “Where’s the pay off?” “What am I getting out of all this being a good Catholic?” then we have got something terribly wrong. Our Christian life must not become a calculation- but one long act of love, one long demonstration of our love for God- and of course we know that real love is never calculating, it is just giving and forgiving. You remember that lovely prayer of St Ignatius: “to give and not to count the cost, to labour and not to look for any reward, save that of knowing that we do thy will….” Only then, when we have written ourselves and our own interest out of our good deeds, will we “win friends”, as the gospel has it, and they will be the friends that really matter- Our Lord and his Holy Mother- and we can be sure that they “will welcome (us) into the tents of eternity”. O Jesus, when we must leave this life and give an account of our stewardship of ourselves, help us to have lived our lives in such a way that we will find in you and your holy Mother and all the saints “some who will welcome (us) into their homes”. Amen.
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