Homily for 29th Sunday Year C

Homily for twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 21 October 2007 Today’s readings are about prayer and the importance of prayer, the necessity for us to be constant in prayer, to persevere with our life of prayer. It is always daunting to talk or preach about prayer, partly because so much drivel, so much confusing stuff, has been written on the subject, and I am sure that some of you are already switching off! The trouble is, that prayer has become associated in the minds of many of us with something complicated and rather special, something perhaps best left to the experts, and there are so many books about prayer that with all their talk of meditation, contemplation, and other rather technical terms, can completely put us off and make us think “This is not for me”. It reminds me in a way of all the mystique and snobbery that surrounds the whole business of wine and wine drinking, especially in this country. People not used to drinking wine feel completely out of their depth when some snooty waiter in a restaurant hands them a wine list the size of a photograph album, and then there’s all that palaver about good years and bad, and people claiming they can tell which slopes a certain vintage was grown on, how can anyone compete with that kind of expertise? On TV programmes about food and wine you get presenters going through a whole rigmarole of sniffing and swishing the wine around in their glass before actually tasting it and saying “Yes- I can taste blackberries, chocolate, a hint of boot polish….” All complete nonsense of course! All you actually need to know about wine is, do I like what I am drinking? If so, try to remember what it’s called and buy it again next time. There are a few easy rules, like the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) and red wine goes with red meat, and, as that great cookery book of the 1960s, “Cooking in a Bedsitter”, said, white wine goes with carpets. You can get along very easily with just a few basic rules of thumb like this and just by trying things out for yourself. Don’t be afraid, just go ahead, have a go, taste and see. Well, that’s enough about wine- I don’t want you to think I am getting obsessed! But do you see my point- forget all the stuff that’s written about wine and just get on with it and enjoy it. Prayer is exactly the same- forget all the stuff that’s written about prayer, the levels and stages of prayer, St So-and-so’s method of prayer, the nine days of this prayer, the hundred days of that, don’t be side-tracked by any of all that. Prayer is not a specialist subject to answer questions on in a quiz programme! Prayer is something easy and straightforward that all of us, however ordinary a Catholic we may feel ourselves to be, has the ability, the right and the duty to engage in. So what is prayer? Well, in essence it is simple a conversation with God. St John Chrysostom, the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, says “Prayer is the supreme good, the familiar conversation with God. It is a relationship with God and a union with him”. You see, we as Christians are called upon to develop a relationship with God, that is what the Christian life is, an on-going and ever–deepening friendship we are trying to have with Our Lord. And how can we have a relationship with someone if we don’t talk to them? We have got to be on good terms with God, and that means at the very least being on speaking terms with him! And so we talk to God, that is what prayer is. We can use other people’s words, the words the Church uses, like the Our Father and the Hail Mary, or we can use our own words, just spilling things out to God, telling him what is on our minds right now. We don’t need to find special words to do that, we don’t need to feel awkward because we haven’t got the right churchy language to put it all in, we can just talk to him as we would talk on our mobiles to a friend we want to keep up to date with our life in all its as pects. And that is important too, we don’t have to clean up our act to talk to God, we don’t have to leave out all the messy bits that won’t sound too good- God knows us inside out, so we don’t need to hold anything back for fear of spoiling the impression; we need to give him the truth, the truth of our joys and sorrows, our anxieties and so on. As we would to a best friend. Of course conversation ideally is a two-way traffic. You won’t have much of a relationship with someone if you do all the talking and you never listen to what the other person is trying to say! So too in prayer: we have to let God get a word in edgeways. How does God speak to us then? Well, principally in the words of Scripture, when we listen attentively to the readings at Mass, when we read portions of Scripture every day in our private devotions- either using the Divine Office, if we like to join in the great prayer of the Church that is always rising from the four corners of the world, or in the excellent Bible reading notes that Melina and Connie sell in our shop. Very often as we read a phrase will just stand out, a sentence will pop up before our eyes, full of meaning for us in our particular situation that day. And God also speaks to us in silence, especially if we come and keep him company by praying before the Blessed Sacrament- in the stillness there Our Lord can drop a word into our minds. The main thing I want to stress this morning, apart from how easy and uncomplicated it actually is to pray, to talk to God, is that this must not be just a sporadic activity on our part, something we only do when we’re feeling in the mood, when a special holy feeling comes over us. I don’t get those holy feelings very often- and that feeling may never come! St John Chrysostom again: he says “Prayer is not confined to set hours or moments, it is in continual activity”. We must keep that life-giving conversation with God going at all times, when we feel like it and when we don’t, for without that conversation our relationship with Our Lord will wither and we will never become the close friends that he wants us to be, and that in our better moments we also desire. We must persevere, we must be like Moses, praying all through the long day and the heat of the battle. Our arms may well grow heavy as we keep them outstretched in prayer, but we can be like Moses and get help to ensure that we persevere – he had Aaron and Hur who came and held his arms up when he grew tired, and we can call on Our Blessed Lady and the Saints to come to our aid too, and join their prayers to ours. May we persevere in our relationship with Our Lord, may we keep our arms outstretched to Heaven in our life-long conversation of prayer, and may the help of Our Blessed Mother ensure that our arms remain firm until sunset. Amen.

Homily on my return from pilgrimage 16 September 2007

Homily for Twentyfourth Sunday In Ordinary Time Year C 16 Sept 2007 I am just back from escorting a parish from Brentwood diocese round Portugal, and Fr Chris is back from his annual leave in Ireland, and I guess during the summer, if such we can call it, many of you have also been away. In France this time of year, early September, is known as “la rentrée”, the coming back, the coming home, because this is the time of year when we come back- the children go back to school, and we return to our routines, to our normal life. There is a saying, isn’t there, that weekdays are fact and weekends are fiction, and that is certainly true of the holiday season, which in England used to be called by the press the silly season, when because everyone was away and everything was shut down, the only news the papers had to print was trivial stuff. So perhaps we have been away, and indulged in holiday mood in what we might call fiction- we feel different, we may even look different, wearing our holiday clothes, our resort wear- or, as a friend of mine said when he saw some brightly coloured shorts I was planning to take to Turkey, our last resort wear. We go to different places, do different things, perhaps do uncharacteristic things, things we wouldn’t normally think of doing at home- we feel somehow liberated from the constraints of our ordinary lives, because we are away, we are on holiday, and often, in a sense, we are on holiday from ourselves. These experiences, these adventures, are all very well, perhaps a necessary letting off steam for us- perhaps we feel it is good for us to kick over the traces once in a while. Perhaps it is. But there is a danger in fooling ourselves into thinking that the fiction that we create on holiday is, or could become, fact. It must remain an escape, and be recognised as such, and we must accept the fact of our lives, of our real selves, which is greater than any fiction, than any fantasy, and return to them, because it is in the reality of our daily lives, in the very ordinariness of our ordinary lives, in the humdrum of our routines, that God is waiting to encounter us- not in the fantasies, not in the escapism of the emotional highs, but in our true selves, in our day to day existence. This is what the prophet Jeremiah means when he says “The heights are a delusion, and the orgies of the mountains also”, a phrase I came across in the breviary some weeks ago and which I cannot get out of my mind. Not in the highs of escapism, but in the plains of our down to earth lives will we find truth, and the God who is Truth. Look at today’s Gospel. Today the Church gives us a second chance this year to reflect on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son tires of his life, and goes off to have a permanent holiday from it, he exchanges fact for fiction, and lives out his fantasies to the full. And what happens? He finds at the end of the day that all he has left in his hands are husks, things of no substance, and he is desperately, supernaturally hungry, because all the fun of the fair has not been able to satisfy him and he ruefully recognises the sheer emptiness of all the pleasures he has been chasing after. What does he do? He returns! He comes home! And once he is on the path of return, what does he find? He has been rather grimly gritting his teeth about his homecoming, rehearsing a speech he is going to make, of abject apology, and being ready for life to be much harder than it was before, recognising he is no longer worthy to be called his father’s son, but actually it is not going to turn out like that at all- the Father is there, coming to meet him on his way, welcoming him with open arms, and giving him back all his former status as the beloved son. This is what we will find, please God, this autumn, as we return to our routines and the calendar moves inexorably on, with our old commitments and responsibilities making their claims on us afresh- it will be in the normality of things, “back in our own backyard” as Byng Crosby (I think) used to sing, that we will find Our Lord waiting for us. The return to ordinary life, the picking up again of our old familiar ways, will not be a thing to be afraid of or resentful about, for if we approach our lives in the right spirit, we will find that God is there and God will reward us and make our burden light. Are we the returning prodigal son? We may, some of us, baulk at identifying with that wayward young man, we may be thinking “Well, that’s all very well, but I haven’t escaped ever, I’ve just been soldiering on, and very hard work it’s been”. In that case perhaps we are rather like the other son, who is so annoyed at all the fuss when his brother suddenly turns up again, and who remonstrates with the father: “Look, all these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed your orders!” He clearly has got just as fed up with the day to day drudgery of life on the farm as his brother had. And our daily routines and our ordinary lives can indeed seem a drudgery, a treadmill, grinding us down. If we see the Christian life as obeying orders, if we see ourselves as slaves, with no say or interest in what’s happening around us, then of course we will be fed up, and we will go a bit sour and resentful, like this other son. Alas, we can all think of people who have been turned sour by religion, who have kept all the rules and ended up bitter and twisted. We must keep the rules out of love, not out of fear, we must follow loyally the teachings of the Church not because we have no choice but because that is our desire, what we do to show our love for Our Lord, Our Lord who said “I do not call you slaves any more, but friends”. Lord Jesus, accept us as we return to you; come and find us in our ordinary lives, and let us find in our daily routines a hundred ways to serve and please you, for the heights are a delusion and we need the truth, the truth of our lives, if we are to know you who are the Truth. Run to us, clasp us in your arms at this Mass and kiss us tenderly as we receive you in Holy Communion. Amen.

Pilgrimage to Portugal

Homily for Our Lady of Sorrows 15 September 2007 delivered in Oporto Cathedral Today’s Liturgy shows us how close to her beloved Son Our Lady was, and how that closeness, that total identification, meant that his pain became her pain. That is a terrible phrase, a piece of psychobabble we hear all the time, but the parents among you, especially perhaps the mothers here, will know the truth of it- how you go through all the turmoils of your children’s lives with them. Closeness to people eventually means that we become like them, we take on some of our friends’ ways, their speech and turns of phrase, even perhaps their opinions. And when we look at that special form of friendship that is marriage, we all know married people who have grown so together that they always know what each other is thinking, what they’re going to say before they say it, and so on. That is why it is very important for us to choose our friends well, because they will influence us. Parents know this very well, that is why they are always so anxious about their children’s friends, especially in the teenage years, when children can become such copycats! As you know, I worked in the East End of London for many years with delinquent teenagers and their families, and one of the first questions I would always ask when I first met a youngster in trouble was “Who are your friends?” In German there is a saying, “Mitgegangen, mitgehangen”, which means, the people you hang around with will get you hanged. So who are our friends then? Well on our pilgrimage this week we have made a deliberate effort to come close to some really major saints, those closest in life to Our Lord. We went to Compostela to get to know St James, to acquire some kind of intimacy with one of the disciples- Peter, James and John- who was always in Our Lord’s inner circle, one of his special friends, one to whom he gave special insights. Then yesterday we journeyed to Fatima, to Our Lady, to draw close to Our Blessed Mother, the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of us all, the person who was and is closest of all to Jesus, who always has his listening ear. Can we let them influence us? I think we should. Let us be a bit rash in our love for Our Lord, like St James- when Jesus said to him “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”, even though he didn’t really know what that meant, nevertheless, he said straightaway “Yes, we can!” We want to have some of that enthusiasm of St James too, that is why we hugged him at Compostela, we want to be one with him and make the same kind of enthusiastic offering of ourselves to Our Lord. And as for Our Lady- do you remember the Gospel reading we had the other day, when the angel appears to Joseph and says “Do not be afraid to take Mary to your home”? Well, that is a message for us- we must not be afraid to take Mary with us to our homes as we return to them this evening. May each one of us have no fear, and be willing and happy to take Mary to our home. Let us make the saints our friends and let our intimacy with them influence us, change our lives and bring us ever closer to our Blessed Lord. Amen.

Twentieth Sunday of Year C 19 August 2007

Photo taken at Pentecost of James (in the red dalmatic) congratulating one of the ten converts received at mass that day.

Homily for Twentieth Sunday in Year C 19 August 2007 This is one of those uncomfortable Gospel readings, especially if we like to think of Jesus as meek and mild, or if we are like the person who accosted me on the 484 the other day to tell me that she had several problems with the Church but not with Jesus because after all, he was a modern man who got on with everybody. Today’s Gospel reminds us very clearly just how demanding Jesus will be if we embark on a relationship with him. It will inevitably shake us up and cause friction, conflict even, at some point in our lives. Jesus says to the disciples quite bluntly, “Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” And he explains why: “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!” What is this fire he is talking about? We must be clear first of all that he is not talking about the fire of hell or the fire of punishment- we do not believe in a God who is rubbing his hands with glee saying “Now they’re for it, I’ve had enough now, I’m really going to punish them this time!” We on the contrary believe in a God who never tires of us, whatever we get up to. This symbol of fire that Jesus uses is the fire that is the awe-inspiring presence of God, the close awareness of God. This comes from the Old Testament of course, and first of all from the encounter that Moses has with God on Mt Sinai in Exodus 3. There we read that God appeared to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed”. And God calls to Moses out of the flames and reveals to him his name, “I am who I am”, he reveals to him something of his nature, of his very essence, exactly what kind of God he is. And then later, when Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness there was a pillar of cloud, that turned at night into a pillar of fire, which stayed with them and which signified to them the continuing presence of God in all their wanderings and troubles, and which acted as their guide as we read in Numbers 9. The pillar of fire guided them all the time, they were constantly aware of it. The Fathers of the Early Church all agree that this fire that guides the Israelites is in fact the Holy Spirit, and of course this reminds us straightaway of the birth of the Church at Pentecost, when St Luke describes the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles with the words “and there appeared unto them tongues as of fire….resting on each one of them”. So what Jesus is fervently wishing for the world is not that there should be some ghastly punishment, but that there should be a new awareness of God, a new closeness of people’s lives to God’s will, all over the earth. And how he wishes that this sense of the reality, the immediacy of God, would set people ablaze with a new enthusiasm for living the sort of life that God wants us to live. Fire is a potent symbol- it stands for warmth and light, indeed our ancestors in their caves only began the long march towards civilisation when they discovered fire and all its properties. It also stands for purefying- in the heat of the fire impurities drop away and in the heat of autoclaves surgical implements become sterile and fit for use in the operating theatre. And it stands for moulding and recreating- in intense heat sand is turned by glass-blowers into glass, and once they are melted by the heat metals can be poured into moulds and take on new shapes and new uses. All of these ideas resonate with us, don’t they, as we think about what a close encounter with God would involve, and what changes it would start off in us. If we let it, that is. Because of course the other thing about fire that has to be borne in mind is, that it is dangerous! So too it is dangerous to get close to God- Moses, we read, “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God”. It is a risk, because God is a lover, he is the best of lovers, and like all lovers, he is demanding. Or perhaps, to put it another way, when we begin to realise more and more of the nature of God, we will see with increasing clarity the things in our lives that are out of place, that jar, that must sooner or later go- our love for God will cause us to make demands on ourselves. And we will change, the fire of love will change us, and we will come to desire that change, because nothing less will satisfy us in our ambition to be close to God. And then of course we will discover that not everyone in our life, be it in the family circle or in the workplace or wherever, will be comfortable with the change that they see in us. For our newly kindled awareness of God in our fellow men and women may cause us to speak out against unfairness and injustice in a way we haven’t bothered or dared to before; our new knowledge of God may cause us to see the wrong thinking that lies behind some of our country’s laws and find us having to stand up for the Church’s teaching in a more open way than we have been inclined to before- we may in other words find that we have to stand up and be counted! We will no longer be content just to relax and go with the flow of our society, because we will be resting in the Lord and going with the flow of the Holy Spirit. Jesus knows this very well, which is why he is carefully warning his disciples of the cost of discipleship in this reading- “the father divided against the son” and so on. For it is in the crucible, in the fire of a real encounter with God, in the heat of the moment, so to say, that we see what God requires of us and how much must be burnt away before we can be poured into the mould he has prepared for us. The risks are great, but the rewards are even greater! This morning we approach the God who lives in the burning bush, which is the tabernacle, the God whose presence never leaves his faithful people, the God who, giving himself to be consumed by us in every Mass, is nevertheless never consumed. As we receive Our Lord in Holy Communion today, let us ask make this our prayer: Lord Jesus, enkindle in us the fire of your love, the fire of the awareness of what you wish to do in our lives. Amen.

Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007

Homily for the Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007 Many years ago I was teaching at a Church of England school for girls in Westminster, where the Headmistress was a formidable woman, Dorothy Stephenson- it had been a grammar school in its heyday, and the saying was that it wasn’t anymore but no-one had dared tell the Head. She used to give little sermons at morning assembly and I remember one feast of Our Lady when she began like this: “Now the Virgin Mary was a young girl, not much older than some of you, but there was one big difference”- and she fixed the girls with a hard stare at this point- “she was obedient!” The Virgin Mary is indeed like us, a human being like us, but there is a difference, and Miss Stephenson was not so far wrong in her view of what that difference consisted of. We know what it was, essentially, and we remind ourselves of the difference every time we say the Hail Mary, when we call on Our Lady and say “Hail Mary, full of grace”. Our Lady was full of grace. Now the text of the first part of the Hail Mary comes as you know from St Luke’s Gospel, the greeting that the angel Gabriel gives to Our Lady, sometimes translated as “full of grace”, sometimes as “highly favoured one”. The Greek word is very important, it is kecharitomene, and actually this is not an adjective, “full”, it is a passive, and literally means “the one who has been filled up, or if you like, the one who has allowed herself to be filled right up to the brim with grace. She is completely filled with the grace of God, so that there is no corner of her life that is not covered by it, there is no area which she has reserved to herself- and hence, of course, no room for any sin, no possibility for God’s will for her to be blocked in any way. She herself acknowledges this when she says to the angel “let it be to me according to your word”. That is where the difference between us and Our Lady lies- we all receive grace from God, grace to enable us to respond to his will for us, but, unlike Our Lady, we restrict the action of that grace in our lives. We hold back bits of ourselves from God, we want to hang on to various areas of our lives, and so grace cannot permeate us to the full, we do not achieve the fullness of grace that was Our Lady’s special privilege. Nevertheless, that is what God wills for us, that is the destiny he had in mind for each one for us- to be like Our Lady, completely conformed to his will by our total acceptance of his grace flowing into every part of ourselves. The point was forcefully made by none other than our dear lamented Cardinal Lustiger, who died in Paris ten days ago. In a homily on the feast of the Assumption in Notre Dame a few years ago, the Cardinal said that God wants each Christian to have his or her own version of the destiny of Mary. Mary was the vessel chosen by God to bring into the world Our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that actually, when you think about it, is our vocation too. After all, each of us is in a sense the servant, the handmaid of the Lord. He says “C’est la volonté de Dieu que son serviteur soit dans le monde celui par qui la vie est donnée - It is the will of God that his servant should be in the world the one through whom life is given”. May each of us strive to realise in our lives this high vocation, to bring the life of Christ to our world, and may our blessed Lady help us to achieve this, by encouraging us to respond – “sans réserve” as Saint Claude used to say, without holding back- to the graces that God will surely send us. Amen.

Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007

Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007

Today’s Gospel starts with what seems to us at first glance a perfectly reasonable request: a man in the crowd asks Jesus to persuade his brother to share their inheritance between them- “give me a share of our inheritance”. It sounds like a request for justice, for fair shares, and so we are perhaps a bit surprised at Our Lord’s rather cool reaction and refusal to get involved- “Who made me your judge or the arbitrator of your claims?” We need to look at that request of the man in the crowd a little more closely- what is it really about? What is he really saying? As so often, to make sense of these things we have to go back to the original greek text. The word we have translated as “inheritance”- kleronomia- is actually, as the RSV, always more accurate, knows, a word meaning property, or real estate. Divide up the property, is what the man is saying. And the word for “arbitrator” –meristes- is literally a word that means “divider”, the one who splits the property up. Now, in the Jewish world at the time of Jesus, normally a dead man’s estate passed whole and entire to the firstborn, what we call in legal terms primogeniture. But you could ask to have it split between the children, which is the norm in some countries like France today. The problem was, would the farm, or whatever the state consisted of, still be viable once it was split up? And this is part of what we must consider this morning: is it OK for me to have what I want from life, what I think of as rightfully mine, is this a legitimate ambition? And especially, we need to consider, is it still OK if my taking these things for myself means taking them away from somebody else? Because usually, my having something will mean someone else, perhaps someone equally or more deserving than me, not having it. And what do we think about that?

Don’t worry, I am not going to use this as a springboard to preach against material things and to urge renunciation upon you. How could I, who you all know, am one of the most acquisitive of people, risk such a thing! No, there is nothing wrong, as far as I see it, in wanting and acquiring the good things of this world- up to a point, and as long as we recognise- as the Church has been teaching from the great Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century to the present day- that possessions come with responsibilities as well as rights. The idea too that you might want to put something by for a rainy day, does that seem so bad? It sounds like the action of a prudent person, and I am sure we would all like to be in the comfortable position of the rich man who says to himself “you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come”, and indeed, perhaps some of you are!

And again, I have to say I rather like the sound of the advice the rich man gives himself: “take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time!” Food and drink, especially wine- especially perhaps Cotes du Rhone- these are surely among the good gifts of a loving Father that we are expected to relish? Enjoying the fruits of creation, appreciating the good things of life, well, it’s almost a religious duty, depending how you look at it. So I often reason with myself.

But there is a danger in all this, isn’t there. And the danger seems to me that in what seems like a proper desire to become self-sufficient, to stand on one’s own two feet in life, and to have your pension plan sorted and your investments ticking over nicely, you can begin to think that you have got life under your own control. What a delusion! And somehow then God is often gradually sidelined, because he is needed so much less, as there are fewer and fewer occasions when we feel frail and unprotected and when the future frightens us, and these, as Fr Bosco reminded us last week, are usually the only occasions in which we turn to God in prayer at all. This is why in his version of the Beatitudes St Luke can say just “Blessed are you poor”- God will always be a vivid reality to people who have no money to shield them from whatever life throws at them.

But life will throw things at us, whoever we are and however much money we’ve got. And we fool ourselves, don’t we, if we think that our possessions and policies, that make us feel so secure, are the source of our ultimate security- as Jesus says “a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns”. The good things of life, which we rightly enjoy, may be taken from us without warning- look how we are reeling in St Saviour’s this week from the sudden death of our beloved Josephine, gone from us in the twinkling of an eye. She is someone, we may safely guess, who is going straight to the heavenly banquet, but can each of us be so sure about ourselves? Will I be going straight from the foie gras and the Cotes du Rhone to the nectar and the ambrosia of the feast with the saints? At the moment it is too close to call….

And so, while we still have time, that most precious of our possessions, and one that may be taken from us any second, let us sort out our portfolio for Heaven, and just as we might go to a financial adviser to get our investments on to a solid footing, let us think about going to another sort of specialist, let us take a searching look at our spiritual life and make a visit to the Confessional this month. Let us make ourselves rich, then, whether we can make ourselves honestly rich in the sight of the world or not, rich in the sight of God. Lord Jesus, give us the grace to keep “our thoughts on heavenly things” as St Paul says, so that when the demand is made for our souls, we will not appear before you empty-handed, but be able to offer you a hoard made up, not of gold and silver, but of our prayers an good deeds. Amen.

Homily for the eleventh Sunday of the Year C 17 June 2007

There is a story that someone wrote in the preface to his book “I want to thank my wife, without whose help this book would have been written in half the time”. In similar vein, I want to thank Fr Sean for making the preparation for this homily much harder than I expected it to be, for we have been discussing this Gospel reading all the week and he has made me see how complex it is. The central action of this dramatic scene which Luke describes for us is the extravagant gesture of love and gratitude of the unnamed woman, the woman “who had a bad name in the town”, wiping the feet of Jesus with her unbraided hair, covering them with her kisses and anointing them with an alabaster jar of ointment. Now all four Gospels have a scene like this in them: I expect you are already thinking of Matthew, who tells us that shortly before the arrest of Jesus, he was at Bethany when a woman came up to him and anointed his head with what Matthew calls “very expensive ointment”, prompting Judas to complain “Why this waste?”, the money could have been given to the poor! Mark tells us the same story, with Jesus explaining “She has done a beautiful thing to me” and telling us that is like anointing his body for burial. John too tells the same story, placing it not in the house of Simon but in the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus; and here it is Mary who anoints Jesus’ feet with her precious ointment and wipes them with her hair, and John tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”. Luke’s account of this scene is quite different- perhaps in fact, it is not a case of him remembering the scene differently from the others, but a completely different occasion altogether- we will let the biblical scholars worry about that! What we need to ask ourselves this morning is, what is Luke trying to tell us in the way he presents this story to us?

We know that this woman, whoever she may have been, is someone “who had a bad name in the town”. Many people have assumed that she was a prostitute, but the Gospel does not say that and we must beware of thinking that the only grave sins are sexual sins. I do not want to suggest that sexual sins are of no consequence, not at all, but there are many other ways of failing God, many other destructive and self-destructive things that we can do that put us at odds with God. The main thing is, that this woman recognises her sinfulness, that she makes a deliberate effort to put the past behind her, and to ask for Our Lord’s forgiveness. She receives in return the assurance of God’s loving forgiveness, and is once again enfolded in Our Lord’s embrace of unconditional, constant love, the only embrace that can truly satisfy, the only love that will never disappoint us or go sour, the only embrace that we can always rely on. On our recent parish pilgrimage, some of us went to Paray le Monial, to the Shrine of St Claude, and we recall what St Claude says of Jesus “You are the only friend, the only true friend”.

Now, commenting on this act of great love, this sign of such devotion, Jesus says in this passage “Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love.” And thus we come to the real point that Luke is determined to make here. The fact that this woman has received forgiveness has changed her whole attitude to life. She has received Our Lord’s boundless love, and her life is now a channel of that same love, she is pouring love out like the expensive ointment, in gratitude to her saviour. How appropriate it is that we read this Gospel only two days after celebrating the feast of the Sacred Heart, to which so many of us at St Saviour’s have such a strong devotion. On Friday we read at mass from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he says “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us”. That love we have received must not lie like so much stagnant water in our lives for kept to ourselves it will just go stale. We must let it instead bubble up in us like a fountain, and let it brim over into the lives of those around us. Our Lord is no longer walking the earth for us in our gratitude to approach him and throw ourselves upon him- but we know that we find Jesus in our fellow men and women, and we can show them the love we want to show him. We must try to become more like God in the way we treat people, in the way we love. I read the other day a wonderful phrase that sums this up in the writings of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, the former Archbishop of Marseille. He is explaining how we must love our neighbour in exactly the same, unconditional, constant, affirming way that God loves each one of us, without thinking whether or not that neighbour is worthy of our love or not. He says “our love of others must borrow from the divine love its most characteristic traits, in the first place, that of gratuité- gratuitousness!

It is that gratuitous, undemanding love that we must, in our love for God, offer to God’s fellow creatures with whom we live. St Luke gives us a challenging example to follow, in this woman whose many sins have been forgiven and who now shows Our Lord such reckless, extravagant love in return. As Mark has Jesus say, “she has done a beautiful thing to me”. Tonight as we go to bed, shall we ask ourselves a question: “What beautiful thing have I done to Jesus today?” And as we turn over in our minds the day that lies ahead of us tomorrow, can we ask ourselves “What beautiful thing shall I do to Jesus tomorrow?” May we all attempt these acts of gratuitous love towards our fellow human beings, whether we like them or not, and may our dear parish, and this town, become like the home of Mary and Martha, “filled with the fragrance of the ointment”, the fragrance of love. Amen.