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
Saturday, 16 October 2010
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.
Friday, 13 August 2010
nineteenth sunday in ordinary time 8 august 2010
How often in the Gospels we hear Our Lord speaking urgently to his disciples of the need for vigilance, for being always on the alert, for not getting too lax, too complacent about our relationship with God. Here Jesus tells them “See that you are dressed for action and have your lamps lit!” The mention of lamps makes us think straightaway doesn’t it of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins of the famous parable, the wise virgins who had brought enough oil with them to keep their lamps lit for when the bridegroom would arrive. It is in Matthew chapter 25 and when finally the bridegroom comes we read that “those who were ready went with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut” (Mt 25 x) and the moral is “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour”, a phrase we find repeated in Matthew and also in Mark. There is a sense in all these stories that we must not drop our guard, that we are like sentries in a war, we have to keep scanning the horizon to see if the enemy is trying to approach. In the First Letter of St Peter we hear the good advice of the apostle: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” (I Pet 5 viii) We think too of course of Our Lord’s request to his disciples when his troubles came upon him and he needed to feel their loyalty- you remember, on the Mt of Olives Jesus saying “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me” (Mt 26 xxxviii) and alas, such is our frail human nature, none of them could stay awake!
What is this watchfulness that Our Lord wants from us? Well, it is partly to show him we care, we care enough about him to stay awake, to stay alert, not to doze off, lulled by the lullaby of the world and all its delights. But it is not just for the enemy that we have to be watching earnestly, it is for the One we love. When we are in love with someone, we are so excited to be in their company that we are wide-awake, we don’t want to miss anything, not a nanosecond of their company: that great love song in the Bible, the Song of Songs, has the lover saying “I slept but my heart was awake. Hark! My Beloved is knocking!” (Cant 5 ii) We should be as eager for Our Lord as that, as ready to wonder if we are hearing his footstep, or recognising the sound of his voice, as we do when we are besotted with someone. Because if we are listening as earnestly as that, then we will hear his voice- he will be speaking to us in all sorts of ways using all sorts of people and anything from the “Metro” to the Bible– things will leap off the page at us, filled suddenly with meaning because we are thinking of him. This watchfulness will show itself also in our fondness for prayer, our determination to keep the lines of communication with the Beloved open at all times- how many times do people text their boyfriend or their girlfriend? Maybe you are doing it even now in some corner of a pew! A bit further on in Luke’s Gospel Luke has Jesus tell us “But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength…” (Lk 21 xxxvi) and St Paul tells the Ephesians “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6 xviii) and ends his First Letter to the Corinthians with the advice “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong” (I Cor 16 xiii).
And so in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying “ You too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an Hour you do not expect”. We have seen that one way of imagining this attitude is to think of the lover waiting for the loved one, but here we have another image: the servants who are waiting up to be ready to greet the Master of the household whenever he returns, however late it may be, however inconvenient it may be. Jesus says we are to be “ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks”. Here we have another aspect of this watchfulness: we are to be on the look-out for the least thing that our Master might want, to be there to hand whatever it is to him, to look after him, to be as it were thinking ahead to help him – the perfect servant, the servant he will love to have by his side, whom he can’t do without, whom he relies on, with whom there is an unbreakable bond of trust.
What we are seeing in fact is a description of the Christian life as we should aim to live it- vigilant and faithful is what we are supposed to be, what Our Lord wants from us above all. An attitude that is all about how we can serve Our Lord and how we can show him our love in our service, how we can grow in our love in our faithfulness to prayer and how, by keeping our hearts always fixed on him, we can discern his traces, his footsteps and the sound of his voice, in a thousand things that happen to us in the course of a week, how we can keep our distance from the snares of evil, how we can stay on guard over our frail human nature so that we do not in a moment of foolishness fall so half asleep with our fantasies that we sell the pass. Those first disciples were a hopeless lot, weren’t they- do you remember on the Mt of Olives Mark tells us Jesus , who so wanted them to stay awake, found them all sleeping “and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?”” (Mk 14 xxxvii) We ask this morning for the grace to stay awake, on the alert and on guard. Help us to stand ready for Our Lord in every aspect of our lives. O Jesus, when you come, find us watching, find us with our lamps lit, find us ready to jump up and let you in- and then, like the Master in today’s Gospel, dear Jesus sit us down at your table and wait on us, take us to the marriage feast, give us the Bread of Heaven from the Table of the King of Kings. Amen.
What is this watchfulness that Our Lord wants from us? Well, it is partly to show him we care, we care enough about him to stay awake, to stay alert, not to doze off, lulled by the lullaby of the world and all its delights. But it is not just for the enemy that we have to be watching earnestly, it is for the One we love. When we are in love with someone, we are so excited to be in their company that we are wide-awake, we don’t want to miss anything, not a nanosecond of their company: that great love song in the Bible, the Song of Songs, has the lover saying “I slept but my heart was awake. Hark! My Beloved is knocking!” (Cant 5 ii) We should be as eager for Our Lord as that, as ready to wonder if we are hearing his footstep, or recognising the sound of his voice, as we do when we are besotted with someone. Because if we are listening as earnestly as that, then we will hear his voice- he will be speaking to us in all sorts of ways using all sorts of people and anything from the “Metro” to the Bible– things will leap off the page at us, filled suddenly with meaning because we are thinking of him. This watchfulness will show itself also in our fondness for prayer, our determination to keep the lines of communication with the Beloved open at all times- how many times do people text their boyfriend or their girlfriend? Maybe you are doing it even now in some corner of a pew! A bit further on in Luke’s Gospel Luke has Jesus tell us “But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength…” (Lk 21 xxxvi) and St Paul tells the Ephesians “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6 xviii) and ends his First Letter to the Corinthians with the advice “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong” (I Cor 16 xiii).
And so in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying “ You too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an Hour you do not expect”. We have seen that one way of imagining this attitude is to think of the lover waiting for the loved one, but here we have another image: the servants who are waiting up to be ready to greet the Master of the household whenever he returns, however late it may be, however inconvenient it may be. Jesus says we are to be “ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks”. Here we have another aspect of this watchfulness: we are to be on the look-out for the least thing that our Master might want, to be there to hand whatever it is to him, to look after him, to be as it were thinking ahead to help him – the perfect servant, the servant he will love to have by his side, whom he can’t do without, whom he relies on, with whom there is an unbreakable bond of trust.
What we are seeing in fact is a description of the Christian life as we should aim to live it- vigilant and faithful is what we are supposed to be, what Our Lord wants from us above all. An attitude that is all about how we can serve Our Lord and how we can show him our love in our service, how we can grow in our love in our faithfulness to prayer and how, by keeping our hearts always fixed on him, we can discern his traces, his footsteps and the sound of his voice, in a thousand things that happen to us in the course of a week, how we can keep our distance from the snares of evil, how we can stay on guard over our frail human nature so that we do not in a moment of foolishness fall so half asleep with our fantasies that we sell the pass. Those first disciples were a hopeless lot, weren’t they- do you remember on the Mt of Olives Mark tells us Jesus , who so wanted them to stay awake, found them all sleeping “and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?”” (Mk 14 xxxvii) We ask this morning for the grace to stay awake, on the alert and on guard. Help us to stand ready for Our Lord in every aspect of our lives. O Jesus, when you come, find us watching, find us with our lamps lit, find us ready to jump up and let you in- and then, like the Master in today’s Gospel, dear Jesus sit us down at your table and wait on us, take us to the marriage feast, give us the Bread of Heaven from the Table of the King of Kings. Amen.
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Sunday 25 July 2010
Homily for 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 25 July 2010
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Sunday 18 July 2010
Homily for Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C 18 July 2010
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
13 June 2010
Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 13 June 2010
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
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