From wonder to life

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 4:43-54) sees Jesus wandering between Samaria, Judea, and Galilee. The narrative is not wholly clear, but at some point along the road Jesus encounters a man whose son is sick and in need of being cured. As sometimes in the gospel, the Lord is not immediately the sweet and gentle Jesus of popular piety. Indeed, His first response seems quite cutting: Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe. If this is where the conversation had ended, the man’s son might never have been cured. But the father presses his case further, saying: Sir, come down before my child dies. The rest, as they say, is history. The man departed, found that his son was cured at the very hour of Jesus had said to him, Your son will live, and the man and his household became followers and believers. How could they not?

Jesus ends this gospel as the healer, but He begins it as the great wanderer, the mobile preacher, or we could simply say, as the Good Shepherd who has gone in search of the lost sheep of Israel. It is a search He continues now in our world through His Church, through His disciples, although how many of us are wholly willing to be the voice of His mercy and the touch of His tender kindness? He returns as well to Cana where He had transformed the water into wine. Can we believe that this story had not leaked out of a gathering of so many people? Is it likely that the steward of that wedding banquet had not dined out several times on the extraordinary story of Jesus’ miracle? The story might even have become a favourite among hard drinkers in the district, as well as the despair of every innkeeper with an eye on his business.

And now, Jesus is approached in Cana by a man from Capernaum whose son is ill. Capernaum was some journey from Cana. Cana is 14 miles from Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee and then it is another 10 miles around the lake to Capernaum (or less if one sails across it). Is it possible that this man had heard of the miracle of the water and wine amidst all the gossip of the seashore markets, and thus pursued Jesus in search of a cure for his son?

If Jesus had read that story in the man’s eyes, perhaps this is why He greeted him with such apparently unwelcoming words: Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe – words said with perhaps a raised eyebrow and an ironic smile? The gospel does not say. This reproach – for reproach it is – is somehow gently delivered, for it does not discourage the man who is in any case urged on by the desperation of the situation: Sir, come down before my child dies. Why does Jesus apparently have then a change of heart and respond to this man so positively? Has He not just reproached him for being a chaser of signs and wonders? Beneath these exchanges, there is a world of action, of decisions made and challenges launched, and it is as well to dwell on them.

Jesus’ reproach is a reproach to us all: Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe. We all seek signs and wonders, not necessarily in some gaudy, carnivalesque manner, but it is human to rise to the thrill of the spectacular. Even if we mature enough not to demand the cheap thrill of the spectacular, it is, nevertheless, only a short distance to writing ourselves into the story of faith as a deserving recipient of the Lord’s wonders. How quickly we forget the words of the publican: O Lord, have pity on me a poor sinner. Or as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn put it, Pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig. Happily, God knows our weakness. He knows we sometimes need this comfort of the spectacular. He gifts His greatest saints with charisms that sometimes leave us gasping with wonder. Jesus is not a showman, but He knows the power of amazement, even though He also knows its dangers.

In other words, Jesus asks for our faith, but He knows it will be a journey for us; a gradual passage, if we are faithful to Him, away from the shallows and into the shadows, the darkness of the afternoon of Good Friday, where nothing but the consolation of obedience to the Eternal Father is left to us. Jesus knows and can hear us pray: Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We do not need to be perfect enough to enter heaven instantly; we just need to be humble enough to bow our heads and ask for His mercy. And then, see how His mercy flows on the father in the scene. The shrift is short; the outcome a transformation of all his hopes.

Who is he, this father, if not in some ways a figure of the Eternal Father whose child – the humanity he has created – is sick and in need of a healer? The Father sends the Son to save us, but in doing so, solicits from the Son His obedience to heal the sickly child: Jesus is His Son by nature; humanity a child of the Father by a grace which has been lost. Here we see that in redeeming us, Jesus does not only reconcile us with the Father, but He restores to the Father the child that has been lost or at least as many of them as are willing to accept this gift.

Nothing is lacking to the Holy Trinity, and yet in the redemption of the wayward child of humanity, the glory of the goodness of God shines forth.

Your son will live, says Jesus. Indeed, he will. Be it done unto us according to His word.

 

  

 

 

A loving ‘yes’

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 28b-34) sees another of those dialogues between Jesus and a private individual – in this case, one of the scribes. Which is the greatest commandment? he asks Jesus, and Jesus replies by citing part of the Shema Yisrael, a key text in the morning and evening prayer of the Jews that declares God’s oneness, our duties to Him, and notably the duty to love God and love one’s neighbour. Yet it is the scribe’s response to this reply that strikes us: before Jesus, he declares this law to be much more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices of the Temple. Jesus offers him an answer, but the scribe – as if he knew full well the answer – then gives us perspective on that answer. Not only is this the best commandment but it is better than all the liturgical grandeur of Temple sacrifice. Jesus in turn blesses his reply, declaring: You are not far from the kingdom of God. What are we to make of this exchange, for many of us no doubt offer up our prayers, works, sufferings and joys every day to God? Have we mistaken the wood for the trees? Should we simply be trying to love God and do what we will?

But that would be too simplistic a way of understanding what is being said here. This dialogue is not a reason to neglect sacrifice but rather to understand it in its true context. This dialogue is not a reason to pretend we are not material beings for whom the physical representation of religion is nothing but a mirage. Our God became incarnate, and our religion is incarnate in order for us creatures of flesh and blood to reconnect with the transcendent and divine. This dialogue then is an invitation to understand the true heart of our liturgy and prayer and to assimilate all our actions into it. In a way, it is another reason why the Colwelian yes must run deep in all our actions.

Is love of God greater than burnt offerings? We must distinguish. Love of God transcends the sacrifices of the old covenant. In the new covenant, however, there is only one sacrifice, and it is the sacrifice of the Son who offers Himself to the Father: behold, I come to do your will. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that this ‘cup’ of the Father’s will, this path He requires Jesus to walk, should pass from Him, and yet in the end, your will be done.

In us, sacrifice and will seem separate and potentially at odds. Sometimes by God’s grace we offer sacrifice for the right reason; sometimes, we may be trying to prove something to ourselves; and sometimes, God help us, we may be engaging in an exterior performance, doing the right thing while never really truly surrendering to God in our hearts, in danger of becoming hypocrites. Genuine hypocrites – if we can get our head around that idea - pretend to make sacrifice only for self-interested reasons. But in Jesus, despite the struggle in the garden – a struggle He allows His human nature to feel to the point of sweating blood – there is no true distinction of self and sacrifice at least from one perspective: Jesus as the God-Man offers His sacrifice, but in some mysterious way He is His sacrifice too: it is in a sense one with His being, for He is the Paschal Victim. His sacrifice is His total yes to the Father in heaven. All His efforts are subsumed in this action of love and submission to the Father and bring the gates of hell crashing down, opening the floodgates of grace to the world again if only the closed hearts of men could receive it.

And this is why the scribe is not far from the kingdom of God: he senses in the order of liturgical sacrifice a greater order that proceeds from love and submission to the will of the Eternal Father. For us living under the conditions of the new and eternal covenant, the lesson is clear: every one of our sacrifices only makes sense when it is plunged in the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus’ yes to God, a yes He was only able to make because Mary first offered her yes at the moment of her annunciation.

Thus, our prayers, works, sufferings and joys are not independent sacrifices looking for their own justification before the throne of God. What brings them to life is the sacrifice of Jesus, represented for us in the Eucharistic sacrifice, where through the actions of the ministerial priesthood acting in the person of Christ, the Church as it were tunes again into that eternal yes of Jesus. Every liturgical action and every daily action is animated by this life force of the will of Jesus which is a will to love God and love neighbour. Nothing now is alien to us, other than sin. And, we need not be afraid of our failures, for our sufficiency comes from Jesus. His life becomes ours; His action informs ours; His yes can become ours as a gift of His grace.  

O Mary, teach us to say yes to the Lord every moment of our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet conceit

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Luke 4: 24-30) should be sobering for us.

We read in this gospel of an attempt that was made on Jesus’ life. Until the moment of His passion, this is the only event in which His life is threatened during his adulthood and in which the hands of the would-be murders are placed upon Him. But the really shocking thing is that this happens in His own hometown. And not only is His life threatened, but the townspeople lead him towards a cliff to throw Him down it. One imagines this place to be the scene of countless childhood games for the youth of the area, for children are always drawn towards danger. And now, it is set to become the place of a brutal and murderous assault.

What is most concerning here is that the people laying hands on Him are those who have known Him for the longest time. It is His neighbours and perhaps even some former friends who are suddenly filled with this violent compulsion against Christ. How skin-deep the appearances can be! Those who have known Him best have the dubious distinction of being those who have threatened Him most. Was this simply because of His identifying Himself with the prophecy of the Messiah a few verses before today's extract begins? Yet it is not that which sparks their anger but the implications He makes by saying He will work no miracles in Nazareth as He had done in Capernaum, just as the earlier prophets had been selective in their missions. He offends their sense of entitlement; He contradicts the implicit story this people tell themselves about their closeness to the Lord.

The lesson for us is simple: we should beware of shallow familiarity with Christ. Familiarity breeds contempt. Easy acquaintanceship is a trap, a counterfeit of true intimacy. We are called to something much deeper and much more alive. We are called to a friendship which would defy the madness of crowds and the bullying self-justifications of a mob who find their reassurance in the fact that everyone shares their inclinations and their outrage. What has Jesus told them that makes them so mad if not that they must not stand on their privileges?

Every one of us, and especially the most powerful, should give serious thought to the dangerous seductions that our supposedly sweet but secretly self-congratulatory intentions give way to. What defenders of the honour of the prophets must these violent neighbours of Christ believed themselves to be! How much steadier and more sensible was their view when compared to that of this young upstart Jesus! How much more respectable were they than a man who had broken every rule of good sense and respectability by tipping over the tables of money changers in the temple!

Like these Nazarenes, however, we should beware of sweet conceit.

Crushing victories

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 21:22-43, 45-46) rehearses a parable that Fulton Sheen reckoned the most touching of all Jesus’ parables: the story of a vineyard owner whose servants were killed by hostile tenants of the vineyard and who finally sent them his son, believing they would respect him. Instead, the tenants killed the son. This is not the first or last time that the Eternal Father appears in Jesus’ parables; most notably, he is symbolised by the father of the prodigal son. Jesus’ listeners believed the father would come and put the tenants to death and give his vineyard to other tenants. In conclusion, Jesus describes Himself as the stone the builders rejectedI, and the chief priests and Pharisees understand very well that the parable is about them and Him.

This is a parable and a scene that tells us many things about the folly of those who know but reject God, and the tenderness of God in sending us His only Son. Yet, we would be wrong if we believed simply that we will never make the same mistakes as the chief priests and the Pharisees. Their fall is a classic pattern, and it is as well to be aware of the stumbling blocks it involves.

The first issue is that the tenants are tenants. This is not bad in itself of course, but every relationship with other people or other things in this life engages our moral responsibility and is exposed to the risks of our moral irresponsibility. The theological virtues orientate us towards God. The moral virtues allow us to relate to the things of this world in a way pleasing to God. These tenants, however, having taken possession of the vineyard, come to see it as their own, their sinecure. They no longer see themselves as stewards of a gift that does not belong to them; rather, the vineyard is theirs and they want it for their own. Possession thereby becomes possessiveness and possessiveness leads to their next error: entitlement.

We are possessive generally towards things, although we might be possessive towards other people. But our possessiveness can then become the grounding for strife and conflict with others. For the risk of taking possession of something is that it brings one into conflict with others, tussling over the mastery and use of the thing in question. Here, the tenants resort to violence to assert the possessiveness that they were wrong to feel in the first place. Having displaced the vineyard owner’s rights, they deny those of his servants likewise. Possessiveness, in other words, leads to entitlement which in turn leads to violence, the undue use of force.

The climax of this pattern comes in Jesus’ response to the violent conflagration in which the parable seems to end: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Of course, this conclusion is an echo of Isaiah, but its hidden corollary tells us the end point of the journey that has led from possessiveness to entitlement and then to violence: that power, taken illicitly and used excessively, ends in defeat. It is not the powerful who win the day. They have not known the value of the gifts they had been given.  Instead, every attempt to grasp and control grows weak. It is a conclusion that recalls the parable of the rich man in hell who wanted to reach out to tell his family about the risks to their eternal happiness. The power and entitlement that he enjoyed in this life is lost in a failure that is utterly complete and final.

The editors of today’s extract for Mass decided to cut out the most difficult line of this gospel: The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls, verse 44. But, if we reflect aright, we need this line back in our meditation. Batter my heart, three person’d God, wrote the poet John Donne. Or, in the words of the Psalmist:

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

 

We are all too ready to be possessive and entitled, and even if our manners are non-violent, our hearts may still be barbarian. Broken things are precious, as again Fulton Sheen used to remark. And for those who do not already recognise their brokenness – isn’t that all of us? - perhaps the best thing to happen to us is to find ourselves broken on this Cornerstone of the Lord, for then, who better to heal us?

Again, those Francis Thompson lines return to give us comfort, coming as they do from the mouth of the Hound of Heaven:

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost I have stored for thee at home.

Rise, clasp my hand and come!

On not falling like lightening

Today's recording will be uploaded later.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10:1-12, 17-20) sees Jesus sending out the seventy-two disciples. He gives them many counsels which they should follow as they carry out their ministry and preach the gospel. We dwelt on most of this passage in October 2024 where the theme of the blog concerned the difference between the wolves and the lambs. Today’s passage also includes the return of the disciples and Jesus’ advice about how they should reflect on their recent actions in which they had exercised extraordinary charismatic gifts. The lessons he gives them then are stark and concern us all today:

I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven

He tells them. The disciples are elated, filled with wonder at the things they have done. They know it has come from Jesus’ power, and yet in that corner of the human mind that is always looking for a glimpse of itself in the minds of others, there is always the danger that their wonder could evolve into vainglory: an egocentric passion that attributes the good done to ourselves, rather than to our maker.

This is the point of Jesus’ recollection, for recollection it is; not a human recollection but a thought from God’s mind, a thought that was there even before Satan used his freewill against his maker: this creature has turned against me and my reign of love.

There is no pain in God, for God no emotions in the sense that we understand them. And yet in these words, do we not hear the pain of Christ, the incarnate God, one who has been sent as redeemer to the human race but who cannot save the fallen angels? It is surely not beyond God’s power to have offered them redemption of course, but the angels as pure spirits knew precisely what they did when they revolted against God. It is only our susceptibility to ignorance and deceit that means our wills are not locked in a state of malicious, self-destructive rebellion.

What is the antidote to this calamitous revolt of Satan? What lesson can the seventy-two draw from it? Jesus offers it to them not in parables but plainly:

Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

In other words, what they accomplish is less important than what they are by God’s choice and election: His children, beloved of the Father, invited to the eternal banquet. Some of us may do great things from a human perspective; others may accomplish little, humanly speaking. Some may know renown; others may be little thought of or dismissed. Little of this matters in an eternal perspective, though it feels so terribly important to us now. 

What matters rather is placing ourselves in the arms of our Saviour who has come to help us carry our burdens, even or especially those we inflict on ourselves, for whose fault was it that we sinned? I return here to a line of Shakespeare oft quoted on this blog:

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

Rejoice that our names are written in the bosom of the Father; rejoice that before we loved Him, He first loved us. This is our glory: the care, the condescension, the favour and abiding affection of the King.

Practice resurrection

A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:20-26) sees Jesus delivering a series of teachings about forgiveness to His disciples. The baseline is that they must be better than the Scribes and the Pharisees. The Old Law forbade murder, He says, but the New Law now forbids any kinds of violence or hostility in our thoughts towards another. So intrinsic is this to our discipleship that Jesus even commands us to reconcile ourselves with our enemies before going to offer our sacrifices. The price of not rising to this challenge is to fall foul of the Judge who, in Monday’s gospel, judged those who had neglected their neighbour.

The paradox at the heart of this New Law lies in our becoming like God: Love one another as I have loved you. While Adam and Eve fell because they desired the be like God by taking the law into their own hands and disobeying Him, we rise by also desiring to be like God but no longer through a jealous grasping of His privileges but rather through a humble imitation or conformity with His nature which is that of Love; we are adopted as His children and are made like Him. We must forgive our neighbour, not because they deserve it but because such conduct follows the example of our Father in Heaven. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, Jesus says elsewhere. It may not of course always be possible to follow all Jesus’ counsels to the letter with regard to reconciliation; sometimes such actions could make things worse; sometimes, our neighbour cannot even bring themselves to recognise that they have hurt us; there is a time and a place, and we should not be out to seek our own justice or justification.

Still, the spirit of reconciliation needs to “gentle our condition” as Shakespeare says: we must always be ready with an open hand, even if we must also use discretion when this spirit is not reciprocal; a smile or even a nod may be the beginning of the process, and Rome was not built in a day. This spirit protects us from the subtle forms of tribalism or enmity that arise when there are unrighted wrongs at stake. The virtues of peace and reconciliation are not honoured enough; or else they are honoured only in a superficial way, made into a kind of ostentatious, skin-deep spectacle, rather than being a labour of the inner heart and soul where Jesus wishes to dwell. We must put down our arms in order to forgive or raise them only in the name of His justice, not our own.

All these things are not mere moral injunctions like some heavy armour that we assume. Rather, they have deep roots for COLW in our call to incarnation. It is not enough to believe Christian principles; Christ’s teachings must take flesh in us. Easily said but not so easily done. Our failure to live these things is a failure that is lived not only in our wills but also in our hearts and unconscious minds, and even in our bodies. For we are creatures of flesh and blood. It is not merely our souls that must be evangelised but the whole man and woman. The gospel must sink below the level of our consciousness and cleanse us of our worse selves. Undoubtedly, this is the duty of what we call inner work, but it is above all the gift of the Holy Spirit who leads us into the desert or indeed to the cross to help us put our flesh – the very marrow of our inner self – to death. For if the grain of wheat falling to the ground does not die, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth new life.

Forgiving our brothers and sisters: this is part of the flourishing of new life in us, the life of the Spirit, leading us into the life of the Father and the Son who, together with the Spirit, take up their abode in our souls. We must allow ourselves to undergo this transformation; we must see that in fasting from the indulgences of hostility and enmity, we can feast on the bread which is to do the will of our Father in heaven. St Paul quotes the Psalmist, putting these words in the mouth of Christ:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,

 but a body you prepared for me;

with burnt offerings and sin offerings

 you were not pleased.

Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—

    I have come to do your will, my God.

This goal, the doing of the will of God, the living in the Divine Will, is so much above the spirit of the world, with its taste for conflict and power games that it is hardly to be understood. No matter. Our bread is to do the will of Him who sent us and who calls us to Himself incessantly again and again. To live reconciliation is to make present again on earth that force of reconciliation which Jesus embodied. We embody it again in our own limited way, but embody it we must, for we are body and soul. And if we bear His cross of reconciliation, our bodies are bound to be marked by the same wounds. How could it be otherwise for the followers of a wounded Saviour?

From the sublime to the ridiculous, let the last word go to the American poet Wendell Berry who dwelt more than most on the implications of such gospel injunctions:

 

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

 

Love someone who does not deserve it, Wendell? Which one of us really does? But God has called us to something better.

The final lines evoke a response to the masters of this world, the champions of hostility to reconciliation, the rulers, the dark principalities and powers into whose hands, as Satan told Jesus, this fallen world has been delivered. Berry concludes:

 

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Saving the best until last

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 25:31-46) dramatizes for us the scene of the Last Judgement. The Son of Man separates the just from the unjust, sifting them according to their works in the world before dismissing the latter into eternal fire and welcoming the former into His eternal bliss. This was a scene often emblazoned on the walls and the tympana of medieval cathedrals, reminding human beings, whether they were at worship or passing in or out of the door, that judgement was coming and that right soon. The damnation of the latter is a subject for meditation in the first week of the Exercises of St Ignatius, one of the tools of spirituality that transformed the troops of the Counter Reformation into a vast company of holy men like St John Ogilvie whose feast falls today. Damnation is not the invention of some hellfire preacher bent on stoking the fears of his listeners, but a revelation of the merciful Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the one who is meek and humble of heart, whose task as the voice of the Father is to initiate us into the mysteries of His Divinity: the mystery of how He is both pure mercy and pure justice, just as He is three and one and yet entirely simple in Himself.

One thing that strikes us now about this judgement scene is how both the just and the unjust had not understood the drama in which they took part in their lives. Yet, surely, this similarity in them arises from different sources.

The just ask the Judge when they saw Him sick, or hungry or thirsty, and gave Him help. In other words, they did not know what they were doing. It is as if the Son is saying: reward them Father for they do not know what they have done. Yet this is no praise of ignorance. The lack of knowledge in the case of the just comes from decisions they made not to deny those who asked for their help. If this means they lacked discernment in life, they have lacked it in the right direction. They erred on the side of generosity. It is not that they did not allow their right hand to know what their left hand was doing; it was that both hands of the just were too busy about the needs they saw before them to count the cost. In this sense, they reflected the nature of God who is all good, for it is in the nature of goodness to share itself. Elsewhere in today’s liturgy, we are reminded of this cascade of goodness that is God and the call that is upon every one of us to imitate it; to make ourselves the children of our Father in heaven. The secret is not to be minded about who we are as we do such an act of generosity, but rather to mind the goodness we mean to achieve. This is not an invitation to be mindless in our giving, as if there were some good in putting change in the pocket of a someone likely to use it to harm themselves; it is one thing to help the undeserving (aren't we all undeserving?) and it is quite another to facilitate a person’s self-destruction. Nevertheless, Jesus’ words are an invitation not to calculate, not to trade on a person’s distress to benefit ourselves; not to pass on the other side of the road because crossing the road to help has nothing in it for us.

The unjust are like the just only in this point of similarity: that they do not exactly know what they have done. Jesus condemns them for actions that they do not recognise as their own. This is not because the Judge is unjust and His victims innocent; rather, it is because they ignored their call as human beings to imitate their Father who is in heaven, pouring forth His goodness on all. They saw the distress of others and either ignored it, or possibly calculated that there was a quick dollar to be made in squeezing the needy into a relationship of dependence.

But why in their case is ignorance no defence? Again, did not Jesus ask the Father to forgive his executioners precisely because they did not know what they were doing? So He did, but in the case of the unjust, their ignorance does not proceed from the thoughtless brutality of men tasked with society’s dirtiest jobs. Rather, it comes from one indubitable source: a lack of love. Love does not calculate; love is a poor merchant but a good donor; love does not serve the self but the other; love turns the barren mountain of isolated faith into an open ocean of connected benevolence and the tinkling cymbals of self-pursuit into a magnificent symphony of goodness: first towards God and then towards others.

Some people drive this principle to an extreme, even to the point of making faith irrelevant. In contrast, there are those who push the importance of faith so far that they excuse their own cruelty in the name of truth. The balance, as so often, lies in holding both sides of the equation together, the paradox of doing the truth in love. This is how the just pass the test and, alas, its neglect is how the unjust fail it. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Who will save us, we ask again, from the body of this death? With man it is impossible, replies the Lord, but with God, all things are possible.

Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ, who came to call sinners and rescue us from the night of death.

Feast and fast

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 9: 14-15) presents us with a paradox that shapes the life of every believer who is committed to following Jesus. The disciples of His cousin John question why His disciples do not fast, and Jesus tells them that as long as the disciples are with the Bridegroom, it is not fitting that they fast, but that a time for fasting will come. It is probably worth noting that while penance is a deeply unfashionable not to say enduringly unpleasant feature of our religion, it is one which comes from the Lord Himself. As he says elsewhere, Unless you do penance, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13: 5).

But let us dwell on the paradox here. We are the wedding guests of this gospel insofar as we dwell with the Bridegroom, and happily we always dwell with the Bridegroom as long as we do not lose Him through mortal sin. Jesus Himself tells us that He and the Father (and, thereby, necessarily the Spirit also) dwell in the souls of those who love Him. What is eternal life except to dwell with Him? In this limited sense, we already hold eternal life in our hands. Our horizons should be different from those of other human beings. We walk with another compass and guide ourselves by another map. In the final analysis, even though we live by faith and not by sight, we are daily held in God's almighty embrace of love and, with His help, we return that embrace to the God who has saved us. 

But here comes the paradox. While in one way we are with the Bridegroom, in another way we are still wayfarers on our journey towards the wedding. While the Eternal One dwells in our souls, we ourselves live in time; our attention and our hearts are constantly surrounded by the things of this world, and being the fallen creatures we are, our minds and hearts too often seek their happiness there. And we are fallen creatures! If any man thinks he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says Saint Paul. The good that we wish to do, we do not, while the evil we would avoid we sometimes do (again St Paul who is not letting us slackers off the hook!). 

Like all the paradoxes in our religion, we have to hold these two things together. Rejoice because we dwell with the Bridegroom. Mourn because we are sinners and we need to do penance, not only to train our wills in some ascetic sense, but to share in the Bridegroom’s sufferings, to be where He our master is, and so to help make reparation for our sins - to fill up in our bodies the sufferings wanting to the passion of Christ, as St Paul tells the Colossians. Too often, we hear these days that only joy is allowed for the Christian. But Christ is not so narrow minded as contemporary soothsayers. We must say our fiat in joy and in sorrow, in feast and in fast; we hold the Bridegroom in our hearts, and yet we must not become strangers to the fact that the Eternally Joyful One wept tears of grief over His beloved Jerusalem. Are we here to be like Him or to propose our self-comforting but fruitless alternative?

Those who forget either end of this paradox are in trouble. If we lose hold of the necessity of living joyfully in our hearts with the Bridegroom, we risk becoming a grim burden to ourselves (and others) for nothing alleviates the heavy atmosphere in which our hearts then live. If we lose hold of the necessity of penance, we become doe-eyed religious narcissists who never even think to darken the door of the confessional and who are easy prey for the enemies of all our souls.

We live in joy but must season our smiles with tears until we reach our journey's end. 

Doing the impossible

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 10:17-27) tells the tale of a young man who approaches our Lord looking for his advice. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus first reminds him of the necessary precepts, for precepts are always an obligation. When the young man answers that he has kept them all his life, there is a beautiful moment in which the gospel tells us that Jesus loved him. Thereafter, Jesus invites him to sell everything he has, give the money to the poor, and to come and follow him. But the young man is sad for he is rich, and he goes away. The gospel concludes with a dialogue between Jesus and the disciples in which the disciples are bewildered to hear Jesus’ observation that the rich will find it very difficult to gain admission to heaven. All things are possible with God, Jesus concludes.

This is a wonderful gospel to be reading just before the beginning of Lent. Who is this young man in the gospel if not ourselves? Would that we were rich says the reader! But we are rich, and here is the paradox: that we are rich both in the things that we ought not to be rich in, and in the things that we need to be rich in.

Like the young man, some of our riches are held illicitly. Let us be clear here. It is not being rich in terms of worldly possessions that is the fundamental problem. Jesus tells us elsewhere in the gospel that the things that defile a man come from his heart, not from outside of him. He is not corrupted by the money in his wallet or the savings in his bank. The kind of problematic wealth that Jesus is referring to is the kind that makes every human cling on to the things they believe they have. We are corrupted by those things that make us feel that we are the masters of our own fate rather than being the children of God. Of course, material possessions may make us feel this way, but that is not their doing but ours. But as I say, fundamentally, we all of us rent out our security, our sense of self and sense of safety, to the things of this world, whether we have lots of money, or lots of friends, or simply whether we believe ourselves to be rich in some immaterial way, such as reputation or respect. In the secret corridors of our mind and of our heart, our dissonant needs do deals to prostitute our better selves to the things of this world.

If this were not so, none of us would find it difficult to carry the cross. If any man would follow me, let him deny himself, says Jesus. He knows we are backsliders, and He also knows what it must cost us, day in and day out - hour in and hour out, minute in and minute out - to say no to ourselves and yes to him. If we struggle in this process, it is no more then He expects, and it is no more than we should expect. For all of us like sheep have gone astray,

and He who might the vantage best have took found out the remedy.

And so we have a kind of wealth, an accumulation of ugly self-investment, from which we must disinvest. But we should not be disheartened, even though we probably will be. For, in reality, we are already in possession of riches beyond our wildest dreams. In the very moment of our baptism, the sign of the cross, the unique hope of the world, was placed upon our foreheads and marked up on our breast. The waters of regeneration were poured over us, and as our sins were cleansed, the most blessed Trinity took up their residence in our souls. So, who is richer then the friend of the king, even if he have nothing but the friendship of the king?

But, there we sit surrounded by our riches, the sacred scriptures, the seven sacraments, the example and writings of the saints, the lights and inspirations that we receive in prayer: why should the list end here? Reader, you may complete it yourself. And, sadly, we are true to the form of rich people when they look around themselves at all these riches and sometimes find themselves staring heartlessly into their own boredom.

Where can I go where I will not find myself? asks St Augustine. Even when we have divested ourselves of what we think are our attachments, there remains that self-indulgent corner of our eye that always looks for its own reflection, and does not realise that in its own boredom, it is tasting not the limitation of the things of God but its own immaturity. It is time to grow.

And, this is why this particular gospel offers us such consolation. Who will free us from the body of this death? asks Saint Paul, well before Saint Augustine had formulated his question. And Jesus here gives us the answer: with man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.

 

The “yes” of conversion

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) rehearses a passage we read in May last year when the Pharisees come questioning Jesus once more to test him. They want to scrutinise His orthodoxy on the question of marriage and divorce in Jewish law, but Jesus turns the tables, showing that Moses’s concession on divorce was to be blamed only on the waywardness of the people. Then, Jesus puts forward the teaching on marriage that belongs to the original purposes of creation and to the new law of grace in which those original purposes are in this case reaffirmed. Marriage is for life, not only as a legal convenience but because the marriage transforms the connection between the spouses into an enduring bond: So, they are no longer two but one flesh.

We might wonder here about Jesus’ failure to take account of the complexity of marital situations and the awful burdens this inflexible law would place on human beings. Isn’t He a little too rigid for the twenty-first century? If only the author of life could come up to our own sophisticated and caring levels! But, the author of life is not merely a rule maker, like some petty tyrant. In a sense, He is the Eternal Law and that law we know must be infinitely good, as He is in Himself. It is the foundation of the law in God that explains why Jesus concludes His remarks commenting that those who divorce their spouse and marry another are guilty of adultery. This was a corollary that must have made the Pharisees rather uncomfortable since they were normally the ones to put the measuring rule against the conduct of the Jews. Normally, it was Jesus who pronounced the words of forgiveness. In this case, He indicates that the moral effects of breaking a marriage bond do not recede into history simply because the former spouses have – to use that awful cliché – moved on. Yet if these are the ends of marriage, how on earth is it to be lived according to the unrelenting standards of the merciful Jesus?

Here is where we must pair this renewal of the teaching on marriage with an understanding of Jesus as the author and fount of all grace. For He who wills the end wills the means. And God who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, as St Paul says, offers humanity that chance by making available to them the living waters of His redemptive grace, the reservoirs and canals of the Sacred Heart, that flood down to us through the sacraments and the sacramentals: through every Mass we attend, every prayer we utter, every inclination of the heart towards His love. If any one thirst, let him come to Me and drink (Jesus 7:37) Jesus will declare in the temple. The renewed teaching on marriage sits alongside the combative path that Jesus traces out for His disciples. He will do the work for it is only by His grace that the work can be done; but it falls to us to decide whether we are in or out; whether we want this or not; whether we will try to follow Him or follow our own instincts; whether we will accept the awful responsibility of being His follower by allowing ourselves to be made like to Him – honoured, if such be God’s will, or unfairly reviled and rejected instead. If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too. The point is not the cross but what the cross points to: reconciliation with Him at any cost.

This is a hard saying; who can bear it? (John 6: 60) was the reaction of some people to Jesus’ teaching on His Eucharistic presence. But this is where Jesus is no longer merely a teacher of sound ethics, nor is He the kind of goodie-two-shoes minister of kindly indulgence, handing out get-out-marriage-free- cards to willing punters. Instead, in marriage as in all the Christian life, He asks of us something utterly extraordinary: that to find our lives, we must lose them. Tweaking Shakespeare’s words only a little, we might say:

Let us once lose our attachments to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our attachments.

When we compare the situation of the people in Moses’ day with our own, there is something the same and something different. The something different we have just described: we live now in the reign of the New Testament of divine grace, the age of His mercy and forgiveness properly understood. If any man loves me, my Father and I will come to him and make our home in him. To understand the enormity of this promise, especially to Jesus’ listeners, we must consider that the Jews believed God was really present in the temple behind the curtains of the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest alone was admitted but once a year. And here He is now, dwelling in the humblest of His servants who love Him. Here is where all our strength must come from; not from our determination to carry on but from the divine winds of grace that carry our ships home to the eternal shores. There is life again beyond our defeats and humiliations, if only our hope holds fast to His promises and to the conviction of His all-encompassing love. Practice resurrection, as the American poet Wendell Berry tells us.

So, if this is what is different from the time of Moses, what is the same? Just our hardness of heart. While the dispensation of mercy is new, the waywardness of human wanderings is as irregular as ever it was. Humanity is not on some progressively improving path towards greater civilisation and more humane behaviour. This was a nineteenth-century myth that became a twentieth-century delusion, and heaven knows how it has infected the Christian imagination with its superficial parody of the gentler virtues while allowing the inner life to become overgrown with thorns.

Recognising our need for conversion, the danger we run through our hardness of heart, is the keystone of our docibilitas – our teachability, as we say in COLW. And let us be in no doubt that it is a grace. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus cites the prophesy of Isaiah on this very point:

For this people’s heart has become calloused;

    they hardly hear with their ears,

    and they have closed their eyes.

Otherwise, they might see with their eyes,

    hear with their ears,

    understand with their hearts

and turn, and I would heal them.

This is not a once-in-a-lifetime task to turn for healing, but rather a daily one, an hourly one: the task of the current minute. Mary is our model who never needed to turn to say “yes” to the Lord but said it freely of her own accord. Our path is more onerous in that regard but similarly imperative.

Jesus will not bend the law like Moses did, but what He offers us is of a magnitude far greater: an invitation into the inner life of the Blessed Trinity where we become His spouse in a bond even more unbreakable than the marriage bond, for it extends beyond our death. Our task is not to become decent people; it is to be radically changed into the image of Jesus, so faithful to Him that others, whether they love or revile us, will find His reflection in our every word and gesture. To be new incarnations of His love to the world: this is our calling. But first and last, we must pronounce the “yes” of conversion of heart. For what God has joined together in grace, let no man put asunder.