Who are you and who am I?

Today's reflection comes from the archives and can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 26-37) contains several alarming descriptions of the end of the world, and yet in another way, these descriptions are as enigmatic as all prophet texts. First, Jesus looks back and evokes the experience of the people who lived at the time of the flood, and then reflects on the events that preceded the destruction of Sodom. So, it will also be in the days of the Son of Man, He observes. Next, Jesus evokes the drama of those who will face that end-of-the-world moment, and how they will know the sudden sundering of the human race in two: then, there will be one taken, and another one left. Finally, He ends with yet another enigmatic reference: where the body is, there too will the vultures gather. Other translations render this differently and refer to eagles. How are we to know how to read the implications of such a text?

Yet, like all texts of Sacred Scripture, this mysterious passage begins to yield when we approach it with two fundamental questions in mind: who are you, O Lord my God, and who am I? For knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are the two lights which make sense of the reality of the universe and help us prepare to hear His call and receive His friendship.

Who are you, O Lord my God? You are a God of just desserts and rewards, punishing as well as rewarding. It is unfashionable to speak of this, but we should reflect on the fact that the word for hell is mentioned more often in the gospel than the word for heaven. Would it be so, if this were not a possibility? Unless we do penance, we shall all likewise perish, Jesus tells us in Luke 13: 3.

But this God of justice is also a God of revelation and redemption who has sent His Son, and the Son will come again in due course to complete the great cycle in which mankind is led back to God, or at least that portion of mankind that has not definitively rejected Him. Still, what are we to make of the suddenness of His action? God seems to deal with things not in our time but in His own. Whole centuries seem to pass with chaos ensuing, only for a crisis to provoke precipitous collapse and judgement. Jesus evokes the sudden interventions of God in this passage, as well as the precision of His judgements that differentiate the fate of one human from that of another. Everything is in His hands. If we fear and tremble, we do no less than obey the command of St Paul in working out our salvation. And, yet, at the same time, we hear the voice of Jesus: be not afraid. Like all paradoxes of the faith, it is not one that we should try to resolve in one sense or the other; God is three and one, Jesus is God and man, Mary is Virgin and Mother, we should be afraid and not afraid: let us hold the paradox in prayer and our ignorance in humility. Only by the gifts of the Holy Spirit is human fear properly driven out, while a divinely-inspired fear of the Lord continues to move us.

From there, we come to our second question: who am I? Am I one of those who wants to look back with Lot’s wife, or to flee with Lot? Am I one of those whose taste for eating, drinking, buying and selling prevails over my taste for coming to the Lord in prayer and humble love? Am I the kind of soul who returns to their house for their possessions, rather than turning their hearts towards the Lord’s temple? Who am I before these choices?

In a sense, the answer to the first question about God provides the answer to the second question about us, without being able to solve it for this or that individual who is still a wayfarer in this vale of tears. If God is our maker, our redeemer and the spouse of our souls, there should only remain in us the fear of offending Him, just as we fear to hurt anyone we love. But this dilemma casts light upon what we are truly attached to, and upon who we are in this moment: for by its light are our secret attachments – and, thereby, all our secret fears – driven out into the open, revealed in their abjectness, exposed in our lifelong capacity for betrayal of God and of ourselves. By refusing to let go of our false selves – our deluded self-image – we are like those who try to preserve what we think life is, rather than accepting to die like the grain of wheat…

And here we discover whether our abjectness is true humility or unhealthy abasement: for humility liberates us to cast ourselves into the arms of the Lord who comes to our aid and hastens to help us, while abasement enslaves us to self-hatred, serving for the soul a dish of disappointed vanity that tries to find some self-respect in sterile self-inflicted pain.

Let us fear only that the vultures attend upon those who depart this life dead in sin. And let us also take heart for we are His body, His mystical body, and our lives are hidden with Christ in God whose grace can overcome our mistaken pride to bring us back to Himself by helping us become who we are meant to be.

Beyond flesh and blood

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 13-19) describes the scene in which the leader of the disciples makes his declaration of faith in the divinity of Jesus before the other apostles, and in which Jesus names him Peter, the rock, to whom He gives the keys of the kingdom. The text is foundational to the Church’s self-understanding and crucial to grasping Peter’s ministry. Let us, however, leave aside the dogmatic structures to which this scene is connected, and instead reflect on a line that passes by usually unnoticed: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

In one sentence, Jesus offers us a commentary on Peter’s journey to this point. It is a significant journey for us to. In one regard, Peter is all flesh and blood. His hot-headed behaviour will get him into trouble in the gospel on more than one occasion, pushing him at times into awkward corners from which he has not the grace to come out unscathed. He walked on the water like a proper charismatic, only to find the H2O gently yielding to receive his body like so many drowning fishermen before him. He wielded the sword in the face of what was practically a lynch mob in the Garden of Gethsemane, only to find his courage blunted by the pertness of a serving girl. Later he will boldly proclaim the faith to the people of Israel, only to lose his grip in an act of papal prevarication, acting ambiguously as if Christians had not been liberated from the strictures of the Mosaic Law (Galatians 2:11-14).  What were all these incidents if not Peter giving in to the waywardness of mere flesh and blood?

There is one further, notorious incident to mention in this regard, and it follows today’s scene in the gospel when flesh and blood led Peter to step boldly forward and make an ass of himself. Jesus had begun to prophesy His future sufferings when Peter rebuked Him and told Him He must never follow such a path. Jesus in that moment gave Peter yet another name which somehow never caught on:

Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.

Thus speaks Jesus, humble and meek of heart, in the face of his friend’s worldliness. Jesus could not have made His feelings any clearer if He had said: my Father in heaven has not revealed this to you, Peter; it comes only from your all too human, flesh and blood perspective. It will be an important lesson for Peter’s successors to remember; papal primacy is a ministry of service to the truth in season and out of season, not a privileged, arbitrary princedom, to be run according to the logic of human expediency. When, after all, was the thorny Paschal logic of death and resurrection ever in season for human calculations?

Finally, now, we can come back to the second part of Jesus’ observation to Peter which attributes Peter’s enlightenment to the work of the Father in heaven. Even if we take the expression flesh and blood in its most positive sense, meaning, for example, our minds and wills, the human being using human powers alone can never discover the divinity of the Son. The greatest philosophers on earth have told us many things, but their writings fail to rise to the insights granted by faith and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These all come instead from the hand of the Father in heaven, building on the faculties of mind and will, as grace builds on nature, to give them access to the fierce and fiery mysteries of God at least as much access as we are capable of here below. This is no strange and exotic possibility, reserved as a rare privilege to the greatest mystics. One of the most startling insights of mystical theology in the twentieth century was that progress in the Christian life should normally lead to this state known as infused contemplation when God feeds the soul directly using the gifts granted at baptism. Why else were those gifts given in the first place? In Peter’s case the action of the Father acclaimed by Jesus suggests that this moment of illumination and of Peter’s confession is the fruit of the gift of understanding, granting him an ever-deeper access to the mysteries of divine revelation. The theological gift of faith may be exercised voluntarily under grace, whereas the gifts of the Holy Spirit move us by His divine initiative, taking us to places that human powers, flesh and blood, cannot imagine.

And so, what is the conclusion but that all who have the faith and the gifts are thereby blessed by the Father, blessed to be lifted above the limited scope of flesh and blood, and blessed to be given a glimpse of the divine wonders that pour forth constantly from God, the wellspring of all goodness, truth, and beauty? Come further up and further in, says C S Lewis’s Aslan to the human children in The Last Battle, the final novel in his Narnia chronicles. But come further up and further in is what the Lord says to us all.

Such is His command: to be ready to step beyond our limited flesh and blood calculations, and to await the blessing of the Father humbly, the blessing that enables us to go further into the mystery of faith that by His cross and resurrection the Son of God has set us free; free - like Peter - to love Him to the end.

Dedication to the Lord

A reocrding of today's reading and reflection can be accessed here.

Today’s gospels from the feria and the memorial were the subject of recent reflections on the blog. For today’s thought, therefore, I turn to the first reading from the memorial of St Willibrord, bishop and missionary, a first millennium Yorkshireman who helped evangelise continental Europe. The reading is from the Book of Deuteronomy (10: 8-9).

What is the meaning of this text and what are its implications? On the surface, it is a prescription about the Levite priesthood on which the Jewish religion depended under the terms of the Old Covenant. They were the ones designated from among the Jewish people to do service in the temple and ceremonialize in liturgical form the first three commandments of the Decalogue. Note the order of their duties: to carry the ark of the covenant, to stand before the Lord, to minster to Him, and to bless in His name. In other words, in the constitution of their priesthood, it was the theological and not the sociological or the pastoral which came first. Primordially, they were there for the service of God; then, and only then, they were set to serve the people by blessing them in God’s name and sharing with them God’s blessings. There is something profoundly important about this conception of priesthood which, so often in our day, is thought about in terms of functionality, of the job, perhaps, for some, of the equal or unequal opportunities. In the Book of Deuteronomy, the service of God comes first. But more than that, it is the service of God that then shapes the lives of those who are appointed to the ministry.

For what does the extract tell us next, other than that the Lord himself is the inheritance of the Levite? The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; Thou maintainest my lot, says the Psalmist. Here we see in the Mosaic Law and in the Psalms a foreshadowing of the priesthood of Christ who is to come, for in fact the Levite priests could still marry, and still exercised the privileges and duties of fatherhood. Whereas Christ as the high priest of the New Covenant was, as St Paul alludes to in the letter to the Hebrews, ordained for men in the things that appertain to God. He was wholly for God, and indeed His availability to the people was not at odds with His being wholly for God but was a fruit of it. From His consecration to the Father came his divine readiness to being the great bridge builder. For in His dealings with the lost sheep, He had no other mission than to bring them back to the Father and make them too share in His goodness, His God-centeredness.

This is why even if the ministerial priesthood is reserved to a particular slice of humanity, the priesthood of the faithful belongs to all those who have been baptised in the death and resurrection of Christ, and who, therefore, have taken a share in His God-centeredness. We are all marked with His character, even if we are not all empowered to distribute His gifts as the ministerial priests are. We are all part of that Body then which, in union with its Head, approaches the throne of the Blessed Trinity in the mysterious worship accomplished in His sacrifice.

In COLW, this has everything to do with how we understand our vocation, for that vocation is not firstly about what we are asked to do, but rather about how we as individuals are meant to reflect something of the utter beauty and holiness of God through His particular call to us, to reflect something of how His inexhaustible holiness was realised in the person of Jesus. Thus, whether we are simply baptised Christians or whether we are privileged enough to have been called to the sacred ministry, we are all meant in some way to bear the ark of the covenant, to stand in the presence of the Lord, to bless His name, and to bless others in His name insofar as we can, mystically priests, prophets and kings, as St Peter says. It is this sense of union with this overwhelming fountain of divine life that St Therese of Lisieux expressed in declaring her vocation to be love. To echo St Catherine of Sienna, how we would set the world on fire if only we had plumbed the depths of this mystery and begged the Lord to bring it to realisation in our own lives.

We probably all often wish we could have His mercy and His largesse. But perhaps we should also pray for His total dedication to the Father, for then we might know better how to live our consecration to the Lord, and how to share together this calling to reflect His glory in our lives. To do so, however, we only have to say with Mary our yes and thank you, regardless of what our vocation is.

The passage of sorrow

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 7: 11-17) sees Jesus arriving in the town of Nain where He encounters a funeral procession for a young man. The deceased’s widowed mother and a large crowd are accompanying the bier when Jesus, without any bidding, approaches them and simply commands the dead man to rise. The townspeople are stunned at what happens next, as stunned no doubt as the grieving mother whose broken heart must hardly have been able to comprehend the turn of events. Jesus says nothing further in this extract, but the news spreads throughout the region that God has visited His people.

What an example the widow of Nain is to us. There is none of the weeping and wailing here that would normally accompany grief in the Palestine of Jesus’ day. We know little of her, except that she had lost her husband, and nothing of her son whose attempts to speak after his resurrection were no doubt hindered by the ritual clothes that were tied around his face.

And, yet, what more do we need to know other than that, with the greatest dignity and soberest poise, she bore her son away from the town to bury him, perhaps beside his late father? There is no protest; she is silent throughout the episode. She was well known to her neighbours since her son’s funeral attracted a considerable crowd. And there she stood for all to see, this grieving widow, now a grieving mother, voiceless save for the inner voice that must have spoken to the heart of Jesus and attracted His compassion.

What can we conclude but that the widow of Nain had already said in her broken heart the fiat in sorrow, the so be it of loss, that the Lord God Almighty called from her? What must every step behind her son’s bier have cost her? What weight must the sight of his shrouded corpse have placed upon her heart and mind? As the great J.R.R. Tolkien says through one of his characters, Nobody should have to bury their child.  

Many spiritual writers have seen in the widow a figure of the Church grieving over her children dead in sin, awaiting the healing word of the Lord to call them back to life. Yet, we might reverse this metaphor, and wonder whether she does not in fact stand for the grief of heaven, weeping with the tears of Good Friday over the loss of the Son of God, who will be suddenly and miraculously restored through resurrection.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine

wrote Francis Thompson in The Hound of Heaven. But Thompson’s sinner, fleeing the Hound, was looking for consolation; not this widow. What we know of her inner state comes from the command of Jesus: do not weep.

There is a model of what is now called accompaniment in Jesus’ attitudes in this gospel. On the one hand, He had compassion on her, says the extract, but on the other hand, He commands her not to weep. Only the victimhood of Jesus provides an ultimate rule of conduct. All other victimhood is, as it were, relative to His. He grieves with us, but there is a bigger picture, a picture that can only be fathomed through looking deeply into the well of His own sufferings.

Perhaps this then is the lesson of the widow of Nain. Not every mother who loses a son finds herself overtaken by his resurrection; indeed, there are only a tiny number of cases we could cite. Nevertheless, the scene in Nain is a sign that every fiat pronounced in sorrow will only ever be temporary; that every broken heart, as shattered as it is, can be mended in the time of grace; that every tear upon red-raw cheek will be wiped away; and that the momentous evils – the physical ones but especially the spiritual ones - that threaten to overwhelm our very being, will ultimately be crushed by the victory of the Lamb who intercedes for us.

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, says the Virgin of Nazareth, who will soon be the widow of Nazareth; let it be done to me likewise, says the widow of Nain. What right have we not to have to travel by the same passage?

Attention and silence

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 1-6) recounts another episode in which Jesus once more breaches the rules of the Pharisees and heals on the Sabbath. Once more, one poor suffering soul is the object of Jesus’ mercy and the object of the Pharisees’ cold calculations. Once more, Jesus asks a question of the Pharisees that they cannot answer; a question that only shows up the fact that it is not their legalism that causes the problem but their sheer hypocrisy in wanting to apply one rule to Jesus and a different rule to others. And they could not reply to these things, the gospel concludes.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who came to the doors of the Church but remained on the threshold, argued that prayer was nothing other than a kind of attention. But one thing that is so striking about this very short passage is that nobody could deny the attention of the Pharisees was focused on Jesus. One Sabbath, when Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. They continue gazing as Jesus responds to their complaints about Him, but they remained silent, says the gospel.  

So, what is the difference between what the Pharisees are doing and the action of prayer? Quite simply the difference is that prayer is attention in humility. He must increase and I must decrease. The seventeenth-century religious sisters of Port Royal-des-Champs in Paris, who believed in the errors of Jansenism, were said to be as pure as angels but as proud as demons. Nobody would have questioned their attention or their silence; it was the uprightness of their hearts that was at stake.

The amazing thing is that despite it all – despite the pride of the Pharisees and their hypocrisy – Jesus still goes among them, reaching out even as His hand is slapped away. He had driven them to silence, but it is they who must surrender themselves. There is no other way. His power to cure the burdens of His people was proven a thousand times over; nobody who had already seen him perform a miracle could have doubted what would be the outcome of that scene in the Pharisee’s house.

And, so here now is Jesus attending to our prayer, and we attending to Him, but our attention is not enough. If the Pharisees’ case is anything to go by, we must strive to ensure that our approach to the Lord is paved not with self-acclamation, not with thoughts of what we might achieve or deserve in the process, nor with movements of the heart that anticipate our own self-gratification, that subtle stuff that creeps through our religion like rising damp. Rather, it must be paved with faith – faith in the One we are speaking to; in His majesty and in His tenderness – and humble and contrite recognition of who we are, the health-giving bread of self-knowledge that reminds us we are rebels, merchants of imperfection, at best publicans who kneel in the shadows of the Temple to pour out our hearts to God, not Pharisees notching up another supposed spiritual conquest on the end of the bench.

In the end, evil doers from the devil down ape the actions of God and ape God’s servants. If like them we watch Jesus carefully and remain silent before Him, let our watching be full of love and our silence be full of reverence and humility. For we are meant to be the anawim of the Lord, the little ones who gather like Mary around the throne of His heart where dwells the majesty and mystery of His abiding love.

A town called malice

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 13:10-17) shows Jesus affirming a certain way of interpreting the moral law. He heals a woman on the Sabbath. To some, the fact that this action was a miracle appears to be irrelevant; for them, He was wrong to heal on the day of rest. Should we see this as a peculiar blindness in those committed to a strict legal framework? Not necessarily.

It would be a mistake to imagine that Jesus’ action is an overturning of the law. The healing of the woman is not a lawless action. In fact, in some ways it is as strictly legal as the interpretation of the sabbatarians. After all, the law that Jesus observes as He cures the woman is the law of mercy by which a lower law gives way to a higher law. He, after all, is the law giver. Moreover, Jesus himself points out that even His critics would have watered their animals on the Sabbath day.

We might say, therefore, that the real problem in this gospel is not the legalism of Jesus' critics but their hypocritical malice; they condemn in Him an action that they would have permitted for themselves. In other words, theirs is a fake accusation, an insincere indictment.

Jesus’ command not to judge others seems to urge us to blame all wrongdoing on ignorance or error in the mind. In an endeavour to be charitable, we prefer to think that it is an exaggerated legalism that leads Jesus’ critics down the wrong path. Yet, it seems rather that their criticism arises from simple bad will. They were not being high minded. They were actually being perverse.

We have to consider this carefully. Human malice and hypocrisy are real factors in the shaping of our lives and the shaping of the lives of others. They are real and present dangers for the human heart, tethered to this earth by jealousy, pride, self-regard, anger, or the unregulated neediness that turns neighbour into an idol and makes a fetish of the fashionable.

What we need in this case is the healing touch of the merciful Lord, coming to our aid even after many years of our slavery. Our salvation lies neither in legalism, nor in some form of deluded largesse about observing the law, but in embracing the eternal law of divine love which alone can cure us of our malice, heal us of our sins, cast the mighty from their thrones, and raise the lowly. And thus will all the people rejoice at all the glorious things that are done by Christ.

 

This body of death

 A recording of today's reading and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel again was the subject of a reflection lastyear, so for today’s blog I turn to the first reading, taken from St Paul’s letter to the Romans (7: 18-25a).

Alongside St Paul’s discourse on love in the first letter to the Corinthians, this passage from Romans is one of the most iconic extracts from his correspondence with the early Church. And in various ways, it is a good counterbalance to it. 1 Corinthians 13 offers us a canticle to the supremacy of divine love, and the fundamental necessity that all other virtues must be filled with its spirit and animated by its power: the greatest of these is charity. The theme is not St Paul’s alone but St John’s also in his letters: we too, he says, have believed in love: et nos credidimus caritati, in the beautiful Latin of St Jerome’s Vulgate translation. The point of today’s passage from the Romans, however, is no longer to draw the reader heavenwards in ecstasy, but rather to show how, despite the miracle of our redemption and the marvels of our growing union with God, certain consequences of sin endure in our very selves.

This is shocking for us; it confuses us. We thought we were better than that! We thought we had left our old ways behind with all the empty promises of Satan; indeed, we say this every Easter Vigil at the renewal of our baptismal promises. But, as all the great spiritual masters observe, we need this knowledge, this reality check. It is, says St Teresa of Avila, the bread with which we should take all our spiritual nourishment.

Not all self-knowledge is painful. The first level of self-knowledge is the awareness of who we are as a creature before Almighty God. Raised to the status of His children by grace, we are, nevertheless, as nothing before His infinity, as grains of sterile sand before an ocean of fertile life.   He is He who is; we are they who are not, or at least not in any absolute sense. Our existence is contingent; we might never have been. We have survived this far, but the lives of most of us will have become a shadowy mystery almost before we are dead and gone, except in the mind of God. Some of us remain a mystery even in this life, ignored, unknown, unremarked, neglected by the surrounding world that is drunk on facetious self-absorption.

And yet God makes so much of us, dressing us in His gifts, blessing us with His gracious kindness, and caring for us in His mercy. Grace not only sanctifies but it elevates the human creature above anything it could have aspired to in nature. In other words, we must hold our littleness together with the knowledge of the dignity that He has given us. We owe it to the truth to acknowledge both the gulf between us and the loving bridges built by His hand.

But then comes the self-knowledge that Paul writes of today:

I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out … When I want to do good, evil lies close at hand.

Ovid, the pagan Roman poet, observed in himself a similar reality. Forgive just a little more Latin but it is so beautiful:

Video proboque meliora,

Deteriora sequor.                                                

I see and approve the better things but the worse things I follow.

It is St Teresa of Avila again who describes the snakes and venomous things that creep around the mansions of the heart, the distractions, attachments, and attraction towards sin that seems to lurk within us, despite our best efforts. St Thomas Aquinas speaks of these tendencies as wounds – and imagine what wounds were like in the pre-antibiotic medieval period – that afflict us even after the initial healing of grace: blindness in the intellect, malice in the will, weak resolution, and unregulated concupiscence in our emotional lives. As a result, we lack not only integrity but also integration; we are a frame filled with fragments that need to be brought to work together, but we are often so poorly coordinated.

There is, however, a divine pedagogy at work in our gradual restoration, an apprenticeship in healing. To become like Christ, we need to go on a journey, initially to the baptismal font. But beyond our passage through that spiritual Jordan, we are called to follow the Master in His peregrinations in life, His encounters with good and evil, His moments of joy, and perhaps also His hour of betrayal at the hands of those who claim to be friends; we must taste something of His sufferings in the spirit, but also of His growth in wisdom of which St Luke speaks tenderly, knowing all the while that the mystery of the Incarnation conceals from us the extraordinary illumination of Jesus’ soul by the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity.

In other words, just as Jesus could have redeemed the world with a simple prayer, His prayers being of infinite value, it would have been possible for Him simply to transform every one of us by some instant miracle of grace at baptism. But since He chose another path to undo the work of sin-the rocky road to Calvary-so we too are called to undertake that journey with Him. Where the Master is, there must be the servant also. Where are you going, Lord? said St Peter who, during his flight from persecution in Rome, had a vision of His Saviour. I am going to Rome to be crucified again, was the reply. And, hearing these words, St Peter turned tail and ran once more – only this time towards the cross that awaited him. St Augustine sees the battle against our evil tendencies as a punishment and test, but we may go further. Our endurance of weakness reminds us of how low Christ brought Himself to redeem us and it confirms for us our utter dependence on Him.

What a challenge lies before us then, not only to fight the weaknesses we are aware of but, also, let us add, to discern little by little the weaknesses of our shadow selves, the people we are in our unconscious minds, the exiles in us who have fled to the margins, protected only by our noisier, angrier parts who hardly remember their own purpose. Our woundedness is not simple; we are compromised and made complex by experience, by the things our heart hides away from our memories out of self-protection. We are a tangle of stories in search of a happy ending, wishing too often the final resolution without the bitter trial that lies between. It is time, my friends, to grow up. It is time to face ourselves.

There is a worse side to our fragile selves, and this is what St Paul confronts in today’s reading. But then there is the hidden side too which only the grace of God, wise counsel, deep work, and careful searching in prayer, can bring back to a state of health and life.

Who, St Paul asks, will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Yes, Lord, and thank you.

Roses from thorns

A recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 12 : 13-21) was the subject of a reflection on the blog this time last year (follow this link). Today’s thought, therefore, concerns today’s first reading from the letter of St Paul to the Romans (4: 20-25).

 St Paul here reflects on the faith of Abraham, its strength, and particularly its anchorage in what God had promised. Yet, St Paul observes, Abraham’s case is a lesson for us, and an example of the transformation that can come about in our lives when we believe in the redemptive actions of Our Lord and Saviour, His death on the Cross that redeems us from sin, and His resurrection from the dead after which He pleads for us before the Father. St Paul leads us to grasp this parallel in which the promises made to Abraham are renewed in the new covenant sealed in the blood of Jesus. It is the unfolding of God’s original plan, not a new approach or a change of heart. In His mercy, God leads man deeper and deeper into the mystery of His friendship, but this cannot come about without a salvific solution to the sin which entwines itself around our very being. We are in chains; we have the possibility now of being liberated. Jesus has died for us, but it is only insofar as we embrace that mystery and live it in our own lives that we can taste His liberation and benefit from its fruits.

And so, there is a new logic that arises with Christ. Abraham was required to be faithful, and heaven knows he was put to the test by God’s command to sacrifice His only son Isaac through whom presumably he thought the divine promises would be fulfilled. But even in these actions we see a shadow of the new logic by which all those who desire to benefit from the new covenant must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Jesus through His transformation from death to life. We do this initially in baptism, but the passage from death to life is woven into every moment, every action, every opportunity we have to serve God. As St Paul again says, I live; now not I but Christ lives in me.

This transformation is the extension of the Incarnation on which we dwell so often in COLW, as we become new Christs in our turn, first through baptism, then by offering our yes and thank you to the Father in every moment, following the example of Mary who stood beside the tragedy of the cross, having once felt the abundance of His life within herself. And just as it was Abraham’s faith that held him to the promises of God, so we need to live our faith, to hold us true to the promises of our transformation in Christ. We need to beg God to perfect that faith through the divine gifts of knowledge, understanding, and especially wisdom.

From now on, in our lives and in the actions of every human being open to grace, there is the opportunity for this transformation to take hold, for the logic and pattern of death and resurrection to overtake and renew our intentions. We simply need to say yes: yes, and thank you, and by your power alone, Lord. The thorns of this life need not remain as thorns: barren, painful, a reminder of our losses and the dangers of our isolation from God. Now through grace, every moment of our life can know the transformation of grace, the passage from death to life, the metamorphosis by which something that can never happen in nature breaks in on the reality of this world: our thorns can become roses.

Now, looked on through the eyes of faith, our daily struggle, our duties, our inner weariness, and pain, can be melded into the mystery of Christ, our elder brother, and turned into a moment of eternal value. The eternity of God can break through on the mundaneness of our lives. The deadened lifelessness of daily disappointment and burden can become a springtime of vigour and joy, for in Christ and through His grace, our ugliness is made beauty, our sorrow is made festivity, and our little nothingness basks in the everlasting gaze of our loving Father and Lord. The eyes of faith bring the horror of the world around us into the eternal moment where God redeems us from the sufferings we endure in order to restore us to our home again.

Through faith and all the consequences that flow from it, life will follow death, triumph will come after disaster, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.    

 

Learning how to die

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

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Today’s gospel (John 12: 24-26) gives us a teaching of Jesus that is utterly central not only to the means by which He offered us redemption but also to the processes by which we, His followers, are incorporated into Him. There can be few passages in the gospel which are more clearly an antidote to everything in us that continues to scream for the survival of the old man of sin within us.

We must understand that evil always copies good, and that the devil is ever the ape of God, as St Jerome says. On the one side stands the old man crucified with Christ that St Paul refers to in the letter to the Romans. On the other stands the ideal to which Jesus calls us, to follow Him as the disciples should follow the Master, for where the Master is there must the disciple be also.

Here is the drama for us. On the one hand, we must not smother the smouldering flax nor break the bruised reed. Weakness must be nurtured, not punished. At the same time, there is every temptation in the world, as Jeremiah says, to put cushions under the elbows of sinners … and, by the way, that means every single one of us. All humans have a taste for the holiday from good. If we are disciples, we struggle not to have a taste for the holiday from doing the better thing.

So, should we always do the better thing, and crucify our old man mercilessly? Not at all; the best and the better may be the enemy of the good. That way madness lies. Worse still, that way lack of integration between our better and our worse selves may take a hold at a deeper level, allowing us to believe in our performances of piety, while failing to back them up with actions that bespeak love truly.  

But the temptation for those who are committed disciples, willing perhaps to die for Him, is to mistake worldliness for moderation, to confuse the inner disgust which can coat our spiritual senses with the inevitable fatigue and weariness of our many duties. We claim to be tired, and maybe we are, but sometimes we are actually looking for Jeremiah’s cushions; we are turning inward; we are seeking not rest but anaesthesia. 

Jesus’ answer: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. St Therese of Lisieux showed us how littleness can embrace this utterly stark doctrine with fruitful abundance. We do not need grandiose gestures here, announcing our sacrifices to the world; we just need a little path through the thorns of our complaining nature, reaching for the flowers of His grace and the fruits of His redemption.  

If anyone serves me, He must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be. Any big mouth can clamour for Christ when they feel pumped up; the challenge is to know how to die when nothing within us can find a reason for it, or when everything in us calls for us to be taken down from the Cross before the sacrifice is accomplished.

From the archives

I have a little trouble with the car this morning so this is blog post from the archives on today's gospel extract. A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 29-32) sees Jesus surrounded by a crowd who have assembled to hear His preaching. They certainly get an ear full, not to say a tongue lashing. It is not clear what unleashes it. Immediately before this extract, a woman had cried out from the crowd that His mother was blessed. Jesus responded that those who do the will of God (like his mother in fact) are blessed, not to dishonour His mother but to dishonour the assumption that a person’s connections are what really count.

And, then, comes the tongue lashing: This is a wicked generation. Oh, how the PR agents, the diplomats, and justice and peace advocates must have shaken their heads in dismay. How on earth could Jesus build bridges with such cutting language? The thing is: Jesus is the bridge and the bridge builder – the ponti-fex, as the Latin has it – who connects us back to God, saving us from the abyss of perdition. The problem with this generation is not that they have not really had the chance to understand; the problem is that they are, like most of humanity, in revolt against God in various ways. But how?

There are perhaps two problems that emerge from the judgement Jesus delivers. The first of these is that, like most of us, the people in their generation believe they are an exception, and as an exception, they merit special treatment. The odd thing is that by this time in Jesus' ministry, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had heard about the abundant signs of Jesus, but, oh no, they still claim they need another one. Yet this exceptionalism is a sin of pride, masquerading perhaps as fervent religiosity, the pretence that their need for a sign is required for a sensible discernment of Jesus’ authenticity. There are few if any among them with the faith of the centurion who even dispenses Jesus from the need to attend his beloved servant in person if only He will cure him; the centurion knows Jesus can cure him, and this is enough.

The second problem of this generation – the problem that their feeling of being an exception actually covers up – is that they are sensationalists, seeking the thrill of the special and miraculous, demanding the dopamine hit of God’s spectacular intervention on their behalf. They are collectors who invest in collectable religious experiences. Many among them will have turned up their noses at the preaching of those dishevelled seventy-two disciples who only had one coat each, because, you know, this lot don’t like peer-led preaching; instead, they want the real deal, a zingy homily like Jesus preached during the Sermon on the Mount. They want the showstopping number from the big guy in the sandals; not a cover version from the apostles’ tribute band. But no sign will be given them except the sign of Jonas.

Now, these two problems of exceptionalism and sensationalism lead to a third: the problem of complacency. They have been given all these chances to hear and embrace the truth from Jesus (and indeed from the seventy-two disciples with one coat each), but for many their search for the sensational probably rests on a hardcore foundation of self-belief – belief in their piety and their being deserving. This crowd believed they knew the divine score, and the divine score was in their favour. We will see that only a few verses later when Jesus visits the house of a Pharisee. But they are here now, in this crowd, the unwittingly complacent religious enthusiasts who believe in their own competence. They have learned nothing from the example of the men of Ninevah, even though they will know the story well. They have learned nothing from the wisdom of Solomon, even though they have heard it read countless times in their synagogues. All the wisdom of the Old Testament has bounced off the surface of their souls that have been rendered impenetrable to God’s inspirations by a panoply of religious observances that wrap them in a safety-blanket of selfish reassurance. Thus, they struggle to expose themselves to, or even conceive of, the dangerous liberation of intimacy with God. They have all the latest colours of phylactery; they treasure the memory of meeting the High Priest as he sailed by them into the Temple during last Passover in a wave of incense. They have confidently purchased the latest Pharisee guide on 365 ways to wash your hands up to the elbows to maintain ritual purity. And yet they have not repented. They are too complacent.

They have not heard the voice of God, echoing in the words of the prophet Joel:

Even now, declares the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

    with fasting and weeping and mourning.

There comes a time when preaching must cease and dialogue must begin, or maybe when dialogue must cease, and preaching begin. But it seems there also comes a time when neither preaching nor dialogue can continue; when preaching and perhaps especially dialogue, can be manipulated and rendered sterile by the listener; when all attempts at reaching out are simply drawn into the spectacular web of hypocrisy that the human heart builds to protect itself from its deepest responsibilities to hear and answer God’s call.

Then, if nothing more can be humanly done, the sign of Jonah is all that remains. The sign of Jonah is, we know, the resurrection, but in a spiritual sense, it is resurrection from sin after redemptive suffering. Talk and listening are good but not even Jesus proposed to talk people all the way to heaven. There is work to be done. This generation of complacent sensationalists, who believe in their own exceptionalism, suffer a kind of locked-in syndrome, unable to take another spiritual step forward, incapable of seeing the urgency of shedding their own wisdom and replacing it with the wisdom of God. For this wisdom would remind them that they suffer from the poison of sin, but that they are also immeasurably blessed by a Saviour who will endure the night of Jonah to lead them into the day of salvation.