The carrying of the cross

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 8: 23 – 9:1) contains some of Jesus’ most severe admonitions: to deny ourselves and take up our cross. He describes some of the factors in this process, warning also that unless His followers confess His name before others, He will not confess their names before the Father. The passage ends with one of His more mysterious prophecies, according to which some of His listeners would not die before they saw the coming of the Kingdom.

This is not the kind of Jesus that people like to hear about these days. People prefer the cuddly type of Jesus, the one who is all smiles and sweetness, the one who gazes benignly on all comers, stands them a drink perhaps, or behaves himself decently at parties. I'm reminded of an anecdote from the life of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor who as a newly published author was invited to a fancy dinner party where one of the other guests was lapsed Catholic Mary McCarthy. McCarthy, at one point, waxed lyrical about her Catholic past, saying to her smiling listeners:

I like the Eucharist; it's such a lovely symbol.

O'Connor, looking up from her soup, replied acidly in her Georgian drawl:

Well, I say if it's just a symbol, the hell with it.

Perhaps one has to be a prophet to speak like that.

But this challenge of denying oneself and picking up one’s cross to follow Jesus is a choice that lies between two apparent extremes which, like all extremes, are adjacent to each other. On the one side, the fallen human being can be counted on to be devoted to themselves, almost unconditionally. No self-denial here, unless it be for self-interested reasons. The whole movement towards self-realisation or self-authentification in our own day – you be you - is a perfect example of this. To me to live is Christ and to die is gain, says St Paul. He would not have said you-be-you but you-be-Christ.

Famously, Saint Augustine wrote:

Two loves have built two cities: the love of self unto the contempt of God has built the city of man, and the love of God unto the contempt of self has built the city of God.

 

The civilization of love that St John Paul II acclaimed was, whether we like it or not, pitched against a civilization devoted to self-interest and self-love.

The other extreme that I mentioned above is not the love of God, so much as a counterfeit of the love of God. As a person becomes more devout, they take on the garments of one of the wedding guests of the Lamb, and yet there remains in them – indeed, in all of us – a streak of self-orientation that is not ready to die. At one level, the Christian life involves ridding ourselves of the obvious misalignment of our lives with the path of Jesus. If we say the fifteen-decade Rosary, the Divine Mercy chaplet, but still get roaring drunk and beat out spouse on a Saturday night, we have not really gone beyond that first level. Go and sin no more, Jesus says to us.

Beyond this point, however, the story of the death of self is not over. The self can live on, dressed now in the garments of devotion and piety. The mind may focus on higher callings to perfection, and yet that perfection can be not a pursuit of our final goal but a pursuit again of self-realisation, just in a religious mode. The love of self is like a moral radiation, the very half-life of which may last a lifetime and need the purification of Purgatory to put an end to it. It is not eliminated overnight in this life, without some mighty miraculous intervention of God. In this sense, we may, like St John of the Cross, prefer to think not about the goal of perfection which opens the door to this kind of self-focused project, but rather to think about union. For union does not belong only to the higher mystics but, in some sense, to every soul in a state of grace where charity reigns in the heart, even imperfectly. St Therese of Lisieux towards the end of her life is far from perfect in her own eyes and surely not in God’s, but she lives in deepest union with Him, overwhelmed by His grace and exultant in His joy.

Here, I am reminded of the old saying that the first thing we want is the last thing we get. If we want to follow Christ, we must go by the path He forges for us. Jesus Himself says it: pick up your cross and follow me.  Not because we want the pain; rather, we want the pleasure of His company, the eternal joy of His heart. This is the pearl of great price for which we may need to sell everything we have. For the following of Christ alone makes sense of the apparent losses we must suffer. We do not want the pain; we want the goal that lies beyond the pain where we are freed from the misery of self-love or indeed from love of this world and transformed by the happiness God wants to share with us.

But what if the pain is the pain of others? In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More must face the prospect of going to his death, knowing that his wife does not understand why he put love of God ahead of love of the family. But in the end, even if Alice gives him something precious in this life, it is but a shadow of the love of God that unites us to the God of love.

Finally, the last paradox of this gospel, part of the death of self that we must undergo, is the realisation that picking up our cross is impossible to us. We cannot deny ourselves by our own power, no more than we can perfect ourselves by our own agency. All we can do is raise our eyes to heaven in supplication. And the One who gave us life in the beginning will bring us to the fulness of the life He wishes to give His children whom He rescues from the shipwreck of this world. All He wants is our “yes”.

And, if, like Mary, we can say “yes” to this cross and “yes” to this path, He will be pleased to say “yes” to our resurrection in His life where all our longings will be fulfilled in the bosom of the Father.

“Don’t just do something, stand there.”

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

Today's gospel (Mark 8:11-13) is but the briefest of extracts. These days, we might even call it a TikTok gospel. The Pharisees approach Jesus, apparently intent on starting an argument. They say they want a sign from Jesus and no doubt some of them are very pleased not to get one. Having refused their requests, Jesus departs rapidly, climbing back into a boat and making His way across the lake.

Once again, for such a short passage, almost every single line raises questions for us. The Pharisees approach because they wish to test Jesus. Perhaps some among them want to test him out of a habit of searching for signs and wonders as proof positive of the Lord’s action; many of us can be guilty of a touch of that. Perhaps the more honest among them see this test as a condition of sound discernment. We may well fear, however, that other Pharisees impose this test precisely because they felt it was one that Jesus could not pass.

Yet how strange if this was indeed their position. At this point in Saint Mark's gospel, Jesus had already cured or delivered many souls from their illnesses or from possession. Had the Pharisees but inquired among the people who lived in the region from where Jesus had just come, they would have learned that He had fed 4,000 of them with a few loaves and fishes. Just what was the point, therefore, of trying to put Him to the test in this way? Given the context, Jesus’s reply comes as no surprise: Why does this generation demand a sign? I tell you solemnly, no sign shall be given to this generation.

Before He says these words, however, there comes a moment that is revelatory and yet hard to decipher. He sighed deeply in his spirit, says one translation of the gospel. But what happens here? Is this frustration? This cannot be a moment of annoyance for even while the perfect God-Man is like us in all things but sin, He does not suffer from the irregular emotions or dissonant needs caused by the wounds of original sin. On the other hand, if this is an occasion for just anger, why does Jesus not just upend the chairs of a couple of nearby Pharisees, like He will one day overturn a row of money changers’ tables in the temple?

Perhaps we may identify in this moment the docibilitas of Jesus–His teachability–which we should ascribe to His human nature. This is a theory and only a theory, but it is one I find instructive if we consider it in relation to Jesus' other kinds of knowledge. For in Jesus, we know there are three kinds of knowledge, although how they combine and coordinate is beyond our understanding to grasp. There is His divine knowledge which He has through His divine nature and which He cannot cease to have and still be God; there is His infused knowledge which He has as Saviour of the human race, and the prophet of the New Testament; and then there is His acquired knowledge which, in the process of assuming human nature, He allows Himself to be subject to; for Jesus grew in grace and wisdom, as St Luke tells us, after He was rediscovered in the temple. In this gospel extract, then, the docibilitas of Jesus is perhaps that dimension of His human nature and knowledge that prepares Him to face what is, as far as we are aware, a new situation for Him; one He must learn to handle, as He once learned to handle a hammer or to be wise about dealing with beggars. His ignorance is not the ignorance caused by sin but of a true human nature, marvellously gifted and yet in formation, saying its own continual "yes" to the Father.

For what confronts Jesus is not just a refusal of people to believe in Him, but a stubborn and pertinacious rejection of Him. While He knows this is bound to happen, perhaps He has not yet had the experience. He has preached, and they no doubt have seen His goodness or at least the strong evidence for it; there have already been countless miracles associated with Him. And still, here they come, the Pharisees, asking for yet more signs. We know from later in the same chapter of Saint Mark that Jesus will draw a very sobering lesson from this encounter: beware the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But in responding to their apparent incomprehension of His ministry, a range of options still lies before Him. Should He just ignore it and go merrily on His way, tiptoeing through the tulips to His next miraculous moment – a sort of “I’m-the-Messiah-so-get-over-it” response? Such a reaction might seem mere complacency. Or, conversely, should He perhaps organise a discussion group with the Pharisees, host a series of meetings for frank and honest exchanges, and facilitate an accommodation with their sensibilities, attempting to honour the diligence in their observance of the law, rather than denouncing the deceits we now associate with the Pharisees’ name? Yet to do this would be to act through desperation, perhaps even contrary to the freedom of those He was trying to help. Faced by their obstinate unbelief, Jesus seems a little like a medical professional, standing before someone critically ill: should He intervene, or should He not? Should He act and try to save the day like some dashing superhero who can put everything to rights, or should He do nothing, as if there is nothing that can be done, and seem to risk defeat?

And this is where, for the God-Man, the docibilitas becomes pertinent. Of course, as God, He knows perfectly well what to do and what will happen to each and every one of the souls He is dealing with. Yet, in His human nature, He must still navigate this incident on this day in this region: to see, to judge and to act. Through docibilitas, therefore, Jesus in His human nature perhaps recognises the moment for what it is, savours the circumstances in all their concreteness, judges the behaviours before Him for what they are. He is neither overly indifferent, nor is He desperately idealistic about wanting to win the Pharisees over to create a kind of “peace-in-our-time” moment: docibilitas, perhaps, leads Him to carve out a response to a problem for which, humanly speaking, there is no solution without compromising the truth. After all, on this latter point, maybe Jesus could have got the Pharisees on His side if only He had not been so bold with His claims to be somebody special. Just think: with a touch of goodhearted idealism, Jesus might have avoided two thousand years of Jewish-Christian tensions if only... if only He had tempered His rather dogmatic views about being God with …just a little more interreligious sensitivity. But, with His mind made up, He breathes forth a sigh, and a profound sigh at that: humanly, it is a triggering of the parasympathetic system that calms the nerves; divinely, it is a breathing forth, a tangible, incarnate sign of His inner life as the Son, perhaps one last breath of grace on the hypocritical hearts listening to Him.

But that is not the end. The gospel offers one more chilling sign of the cost that the Pharisees’ hypocrisy incurs: And he left them and getting into the boat again he departed to the other side. It was not that Jesus was not there for them, but love them as He no doubt did, He was not there at their wilful beck and call for streaming on demand. The unconditional God of love, the God who goes in search of us when we are lost, is not for all that a TV dinner kind of God who is happy to be shoved in the microwave of our unfaithful hearts when we happen to feel fervent. He will leave the Pharisees for now, hopefully to learn from the disenchanting, bitter taste of their own unbelief. For all their feelings of being justified, they cannot have taken much joy in seeing Jesus retreating in a boat across the lake.

Docibilitas - our teachability – should among other things lead us to a sense of what is within our capacity and of what is not. Through docibilitas, we avoid the extremes that might lead us either to a attitude that is ignorant and indifferent to what is around us, or to a mindset that urges us to idealistic or romantic dreams about ourselves or others. To be docile, to be able to learn from what is around us, as Jesus was, is not to be passive but to recognise the hand of Providence in all that befalls us; to ask for no more than the goodness of God offers us; and finally, to allow ourselves to be led on by that Spirit that Jesus sighed forth with such feeling; the same Spirit that would wrap all men in its embrace, but not cast its pearls before their refusal of the truth. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, and as the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland says, we must learn not just to do something but to stand there; to learn to await God’s moment. 

The peace of the lamb

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 1-9), a passage chosen to mark the feast of Saint Cyril and St Methodius, is one of those parts of the gospel where one could dwell on every line for quite some time. Every expression, every metaphor, and every allusion is pregnant with meaning and significance for the disciples of the Lord. Perhaps, the selection of the seventy-two disciples and their commissioning as missionaries of the good news might make us feel that these are words addressed to those in consecrated life rather than to every Christian. Indeed, in a very concrete sense, the commissioning of the seventy-two is like the creation of the presbyterate, just as the commissioning of the Twelve is the foundation of the episcopate. Yet, in a broader sense, these seventy-two disciples stand for every one of us, and while we may not all live out every single counsel that Jesus places on their shoulders, we are at least called to emulate who they were. And who were they but lambs in the midst of wolves?

To be a lamb in the Christian sense is to be many things. First, it is to be an image of Christ who is the Lamb of God, the Saviour sent for the redemption of the world. St Augustine says that while he is a Christian for himself, he is a priest for others. But on another level, we may observe that to be Christian is to be for others, and primordially for God. Greater love than this hath no one, that a man should lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). Saint Peter tells us that we are all priests, prophets, and kings, meaning that we all share something of these characteristics which exist substantially in the person of Jesus Christ. We are not all appointed to minister sacramentally to his Mystical Body for that is a role accorded only by the Sacrament of Orders, and, nevertheless, there must be something Christlike in each and every one of us. To be a Christian, therefore, is to be a lamb.

With this slightly uncomfortable reflection, we may consider an even more uncomfortable reflection: that we are sent out as lambs among wolves. Here, Jesus’ metaphor evokes everything about the world that we may fear. I take the world in the sense that Saint John gives to that word: the way in which its forces seem ranged against us, the pressure that they exert on us, the exploitation and manipulation they impose. The intent of the wolf is to consume the lamb while the prospect of the unwary lamb is literally to become a lamb’s supper. Who then is the wolf? We may well ask the question, as the scribe who asked Jesus: who then is my neighbour? And the answer to the first question is disturbingly close to the answer to the second. The wolf is my neighbour, my brother, and my sister. Indeed, as the decadent French poet Baudelaire wrote:

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère

Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother.

In other words, you, reader, are the wolf and so too am I. Not that I am all bad (and neither may I say are you). It’s just that we are shapeshifters or, if you prefer, backsliders. Like eggs that can stand on neither of their ends, in the absence of God’s help, we humans are prone first to disobedience and then to every other disgrace that follows on our liberation from God. When we are good, we are very, very good, and when we are bad, we can be rotten. We are lambs by our baptism, we are wolves by birth. We cannot but be sent out as lambs among wolves, for the wolves are among us; indeed, except when we are faithful, they are ourselves.

Every society or indeed social group is prone to want to identify the guilty ones among them – the source of the trouble they all suffer from – and as often as not they scapegoat the wrong person. The key insight of Christianity was to show us that the scapegoat, Christ, is innocent, and that it is we – the rest of us – who are the guilty ones, the source of the problem. In short, the wolves.

But if we are then sent out as lambs among the wolves, we are called to recognise a reality that is, as Chesterton was wont to say, stereoscopic. Saints are not so very different from sinners. Jesus himself said the just man falls seven times a day. We are clay vessels, and even the best of us lack conviction at times and may be full of passionate intensity at just the wrong moments and in just the wrong ways.

These realities are not a reason to despair but rather to become realistic about who we are and about our utter dependence on God. When we say “Peace be to this house” to our neighbour, we must remember that we are unreliable diplomats of peace unless we keep our hearts for the Lord. For that, we must recall that only in the reign of Christ can His peace flourish; only if we say our “yes” continually; only when He remains master of the house, can we we sure that the house is inhabited by lambs, rather than being overrun by wolves.

The editors of today’s gospel extract did not include verses 10-12 from the tenth chapter of Luke, and yet their conclusion is part of the admonition we must daily administer to ourselves:

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for all that town. Such are the words of the Lamb, Christ.

For ourselves, the meaning is clear: to be born a wolf is no excuse for remaining a wolf. If the miracles of grace performed in us had been performed in our neighbours, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

Peace then be upon all our houses, the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ.

The cure that awaits us

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6:53-56) presents one simple scene of the gospel that might be easily overlooked, but which is full of meaning for ourselves and the power of Jesus. Jesus and His disciples were moored at Gennesaret, and the people were following them in their droves. As soon as word got around that Jesus was near at hand, people started flocking towards Him in search of healing for themselves and their friends and relatives. Laying out the sick in the public places, they made it possible for them to touch Jesus as He walked by, and many were thus cured, merely by being within reach of the Saviour.

It would be easy to read this gospel as a story of the fickleness of the people. The healing and the cures come so easily to them, one might be permitted to wonder if the enthusiasm of the crowd was like the enthusiasm of followers after a travelling circus. Were there souls here present who would one day call for the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem? How could they appreciate such immense gifts when they were as abundant or as common as flowers in spring? And as many as touched the fringe of His garment were made well. Easy come, easy go, isn’t it?

And, nevertheless, the miracles worked are not automatic, but rather the work of God’s superabundance. Blessed was the land of Gennesaret, for in that moment, there had rarely been such a fountain of grace or divine gifts known to men. He will have mercy on whom He has mercy. As the presence of evil makes men question whether there is a God, so His gift-giving fills the mind with the conviction that all will be well– as every human heart not utterly lost to demonic cynicism senses that it should be.

Yet, for all that, if we only read this gospel from the perspective of the enthusiastic crowds, we have in a way read it backwards. The action of this gospel does not begin with their enthusiasm, but rather with the coming of Jesus. The crowds were not seeking Him before He had begun to seek them. It is not their enthusiasm which gives this scene its deepest colour. Rather, it is the dogged determination of the Divine Shepherd who comes now in search of the lost sheep.

Note also how these sheep approach Him. On recognising Him, they ran about to seize the moment. They implored His gifts. They practically barricaded the roads with the bodies of the sick. The heart of the Shepherd that went in search of His people was met with fervent welcome, a sense of obligation, and a readiness to importune Him until He had mercy on them, like the woman in the parable who troubles the judge until she gets judgement from him (Luke 18: 1-8). Heart speaks unto heart, as the motto of St John Henry Newman says. Here the heart of the people spoke, because among them they sensed the presence of the Divine Heart. No one ever spoke as this man does, say the temple guards to the Pharisees who wanted Jesus arrested.

Where are we in this gospel scene? Where do we stand in relation to this Divine Visitor in whose hands an abundance of grace is held for our benefit? Do we run after Him? Do we importune Him? Do we mobilise our neighbours as much as we can to make them aware of the blessings that He has for them? Most of all, are we prepared to join the sick and lame in the streets in the hope of receiving from His abundance? Next to the mystery of our own waywardness – our weakness before the three enemies outlined in the gospel last Friday – comes the mystery of our failure to recognise and confess our neediness daily, not to say hourly, not to say in every minute of every day.

And yet, if only we could seize the moment, we might just find that it is in that passing second, that passing moment of grace, that the fringe of His garment is closest to us. Jesus may be hard to recognise from such a supine angle. But we should not doubt that He is there for us, just beyond our inner chaos, just beyond the buffeting tumult of worldly passions, or the seductive traps that the devil lays beneath our feet. There He is for us, passing in the crowd, close to us in our woundedness, driven on by His goodness, busy among the throng, but ever ready to come to our aid, if we will but reach out our feeble hand and seek to touch the fringe of His garment. All He wants is for us to say a determined, decided, and persistent “yes” to the solution He brings to the diseases that hold us back from embracing Him as we are called to do.

The only question that remains now is whether we really want to be cured.

The path to the tomb

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6: 14-29) recounts the events leading up to the beheading of John the Baptist. Herod first imprisoned John for denouncing his marital arrangements, held him prisoner but kept him alive, despite his murderous wife’s desires, and finally – ensnared, like many an arrogant and unwise braggart, by his own words – orders the execution of the herald of the Christ to satisfy the whims of his latest object of lust. For who can believe Herod had no plans for his dancing stepdaughter Salome? She may of course have appeared slightly less desirable with rivulets of blood running down her arms, as she held the decapitated head of the Baptist aloft for everyone to see.

The events of those days and of the fateful night of John’s death are not for the squeamish. They are especially not for the casuists who have not the daring or the desire to go where John’s courage took him. For let us not forget: John was tough on doctrine. His pastoral touch had little to do with soft soaping the consciences of the wayward. He was not in search of accommodations, nor of compromises, nor indeed of finding the good in Herod’s and Herodias’s connubial settlement which was, for all we know, one of gently courtesy and attentive, mutual support; John knew full well that while the light shines in the darkness, the darkness does not comprehend it (John 1:5). For his part, Herod, St Mark tells us, was greatly perplexed and yet heard him gladly, like the sinner who has some kind of relish for the truth but perhaps not the courage yet to do anything about it. Do not extinguish the smoking flax (Matthew 12:20).  

Yet in these events, there are also signs of our own struggles, even if our experiences lie far from the glorious palaces of Herod or the dungeon in which John met his death. Their struggles are ours, for we are on a battleground, or indeed that battleground lies within us. The peace of God in this life is not the peace we will know in heaven but rather the clarity He grants us in the chaos of this life: the chaos in us and the chaos around us. Our call to be contemplative is at once to know the peace within but also to know what and who its enemies are. For they are closer to us than we often are aware of.

Thus, the enmity of the world runs through this gospel. Herod himself is a worldly power run wild, while his morals and expectations are those of the fallen world: the world structured by standards other than God’s. It is not just that the events that unfold are immoral; it is also that the context in which they unfold seems irresistible, unless you have the moral fibre of a man like John. How many parallels there are here with our own situation! It is not just the written laws of the world that surround us; it is all the unspoken norms and expectations that play on our instincts as social animals to fall in and not to stand out. There is only one solution, and it is John’s solution. Speak the truth to power when power confronts us. We must not elect our own martyrdom; but neither must we avoid it if it comes to our door – a door which, for all our outward facing charity, we must allow God to keep watch over.

For, in the end, the enmity of the world would not be half so troublesome to us if it did not find an ally in the enmity of our flesh. The philosopher Immanuel Kant waxed lyrical about the starry heavens above and the moral law within, but the inner man’s lawfulness is dubious at best. The battleground extends within us, and if we have no awareness of it, that is simply because we have been concussed by our own surrender. Herod and Herodias are driven on by their lusts, even if, in Herod’s refusal to recant his rash vow of giving Salome anything she wanted, he showed himself the victim of the expectations of the world, just like every other moral invertebrate. Yet his was fallen flesh, like our own. If we think we are above Herod’s disorders, we might be in for a rude awakening. Original sin weakens every faculty within us, and grace, while it heals, does not take away that thorn in the flesh. Lord, don’t trust Philip, as St Philip Neri prayed, and St Therese of Lisieux towards the end of her life was less and less disturbed by her sins, not because they were little but because they reminded her of her dependence on her redeeming God. She too was a fallen child. Sorrow goes with humility and confidence. John probably invited Herod down to the Jordan for baptism and repentance; if only he had gone. If only he had gone.

The enmity of this world and the enmity of our own flesh, however, might yet be easier to fight were it not for the enmity of the devil. Our media is full of every conspiracy theory going except the one which is a dead cert: the conspiracy of the devil against every single one of us. Are we loved by God? We are hated by the devil – loathed with a loathing that proceeds from an incalculable malice and jealousy, a drive to destroy and despair alike. But then, here’s the thing. Unlike in the movies where the devil speaks in pantomimic guttural tones, the voice of the devil is mostly as sweet and seductive as Salome’s dancing. He uses fear when he needs to: fear of God and fear of sin, as well as fear of the world or fear of superstitions such as Herod entertained. He uses above all deceit, for as God is the author of truth, the devil is the counterfeiter of truth, the extraordinary minister of unholy miscommunication. So, Jerome calls him the ape of God for St Michael’s question Quis ut Deus? Who is like unto God? was only a response to the devil’s pretension of being like God.

For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

And our first parents would be like the devil too, believing they were like God. The devil runs through today’s gospel scene, whispering at Herod’s ear and in Herodias’s plotting, titivating this palace of certain damnation, and murmuring, murmuring, murmuring in the ear of John who sits in the dungeon where the darkness corrodes his human confidence and leaves him naked and bereft of consolation.

When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb, like that of Jesus. For, in the end, there is only one solution in our fight against the three enemies, and it is the path that Jesus took, the path to the cross, and the path to the tomb where John preceded Him: there to await the resurrection to life that is ours for the asking, if only we ask, if only we say ‘yes’ to it, at every moment of our lives.

Our souls as the battlegrounds

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

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Today's gospel (Mark 5: 1-20) is one of the most touching and bewildering in all of St Mark’s life of our Lord. It is most touching, on the one hand, because Jesus delivers a man who is in utter torment from a large number of demons. It is most bewildering because it is not really clear why Jesus should send these demons into a local herd of pigs who then destroy themselves by running off a cliff.

Our hearts must go out to the man possessed in this incident. He is tortured by the demons who have possessed him. Demonic possession is a real, not a symbolic, spiritual event, and it requires a real ministry of exorcists to manage it even today. But this man’s misery is not only spiritual or psychological. In addition to his internal torment, he lives in a cemetery, howls his pain day and night to whoever will hear him, and even gashes himself with stones. This last action may in fact be an attempt at self-therapy, but self-therapy of this kind is itself a torture and cruel burden. If we read these events at a spiritual level, however, this possessed man could stand for any soul who becomes seduced by passions or appetites within, only to find that such passions and appetites themselves become torturers who exact full payment. Perhaps these appetites are for bodily or sensuous pleasures or, for the more pious, perhaps these appetites are for spiritual satisfactions: certainties, signs of approval from God, self-validation and things of this sort. These too can torture no less than sensuous passions to which one has become enslaved. Religious idealism is not a sign of integrity but a dangerous disguise of inner disorder. Who can free us from the body of this death? We know the answer And it is not ourselves.

What is more bewildering in this gospel is the fact that Jesus drove out the demons from this man's soul and allowed them to enter the herd of swine which then plunged themselves over the edge of a cliff. The effect of this event was so great that the people of the town begged Jesus to leave the area. Indeed, the gospel tells us that the people of the town were afraid at what had happened. The Fathers of the Church commenting on this scene offer various interpretations of its meaning. Perhaps the most persuasive, however, is the Jesus is showing the townspeople, and by extension anyone who hears about this event, about the terrible, destructive power that demons can wield. The only “solace” the townspeople had offered to the man possessed was to attempt to put him in chains which he broke in his fury. But this will not do. We cannot protect ourselves from evil by pretending it does not exist or by building imaginary safe spaces for our modern souls. We cannot guard against the gates of hell by minimising the risks.

Especially in our own day, the ambient culture is so enamoured of individual choice that we do not like to think upon the consequences of those who give themselves to evil actions. The story of the man set free of the legion of demons should be a lesson for us that ignorance is no protection, and that we are called to conversion because our souls are a battleground of the Kingdom of God.

Learning our lessons

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 4:26-34) invites us to reflect not only on what the Lord wishes to teach us but also on how He wishes to teach it. We hear two key parables of Jesus in this passage, one of which comes from farming and the other of which – the mustard seed - comes from the natural world. In the first parable, we see a farmer who scatters seed and finds that, with the passage of time, nature plays its part too. Before long, his crop has grown, and it is time for the harvest. In the second parable, we hear a story from the natural world which operates under the hand of the Divine Farmer. Here, even without the intervention of human hand, the small seed grows in the ground and from it sprouts a plant under which the birds can make their home. Lastly, we learn that while Jesus used these parables to teach the people, in private to the disciples He explained his meaning. This passage of course raises many questions, not only about how God fosters the supernatural life in our souls, but also how the divine teacher, Jesus, wishes to enlighten His listeners. These two outcomes are of course intimately linked.

Let's just focus, however, on the second. Why did Jesus use parables? Perhaps we can identify two functions of the parables which together form a paradox.

In His incarnation, Jesus fulfils three roles: priest, prophet, and king. As priest, He is our redeemer whose actions purify us from sin. As king, He is our ruler who reigns over us and indeed over the whole universe. But as prophet, He is our teacher, for contrary to the usual meaning of prophet - one who sees the future - the prophet tells us about the ways of God. O Oriens declared the fifth great O Antiphon before Christmas: Jesus is the rising sun who illumines those who sit in the shadow of darkness.

And yet this illumination is not mere information. The teachings of Jesus are not like an instruction leaflet from IKEA. They are not even merely a Highway Code for the royal path of the Cross. Rather, to be heard and received, the parables must strike home. The heart must become open, the soul must pay attention in such a way that the message is taken to heart. Nobody takes to heart an IKEA instruction leaflet. To take something to heart is to be changed by it; it is to want to change one's life because of it; and to do such a thing may require us to grapple with it, even time after time. And so, as the great Canadian theorist of communication, Marshall McLuhan, a devout Catholic, said, The medium is the message. The medium here is the parable, but the parable, as we have noted, is not just information. The parable calls us to grapple with ourselves; the parable calls us to grapple with God, as we surrender to Him.

The parable, in other words, requires of us to be contemplatives of truth rather than consumers of information. And here we come to the other function of the parable which is paradoxically a contradiction of the first function. For while the parable is an open invitation, it is also a kind of locked door or barrier. We may not just listen to the parable like we might read a road sign. That is not good enough. Its lessons are not just for the mind. Anyone who is not prepared at least to take its message to heart can gain access to its real meaning. Here, the parable does not illumine by its depths but disappointments by its shallowness. Those who contemplate sincerely the parables and are prepared to take them to heart find that, rather like the Tardis of Doctor Who, they are larger on the inside than on the outside. Those who merely listen, as if they were flicking through the pages of a free newspaper, can expect to make little progress with them. It is as the prophet Isaiah, quoted by St Matthew, says: By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.

The drama for us today as we have said is that, all too often, we behave as consumers of information. Indeed, we can behave as consumers towards religion, seeking not a relationship with God but a buyer’s guarantee of his or her own justification. We need to leave these habits in order to become what God intends us to be: no longer the puppets of our unregulated needs but the willing disciples of divine truth, who are ready to part with everything, not least our self-deceptions, so that His light might flood our minds, change our hearts, soothe our wounds with His joy, and wrap us in His embrace of eternal love.

 

 

Standing when all about you falls apart

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 3:22-30) revisits a passage we heard almost exactly twelve months ago (22 January 2024). The scribes from Jerusalem – perhaps supposedly a better class of scribe – deliver their judgement on Jesus with what might have been the kind of scoff we should expect from high-placed talking heads in Roman Palestine:

 He is possessed by the devil, they say. 

Jesus’ refutation of their precipitately formed opinion is swift and decisive: How can Satan cast out Satan? He replies. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. The final lines of this passage, however, are a warning of the ominous confusion that had descended on these high authorities from the capital of Israel: Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, never has forgiveness. Let us consider these three movements of the gospel, like three movements in a piece of music.

 

The first movement

He is possessed by the devil, say the scribes. Thus, they become the malign patron saints of all those who, henceforth, in the history of the Mystical Body will take scandal at her action and find a devil in her. Their descendants might be traced today to those who accuse the Church of wickedly barring women’s ordination or oppressing certain minorities. There is a mystery here and it is a mystery of iniquity. It is a common enough assumption these days that we take the Lord’s inunction not to judge as a command to think everyone is inspired by the best of intentions. Judge not, lest you be judged, is the Lord’s command, and yet He also tells us to be wise as serpents; we cannot take this rule about not judging as an indication that we will not face malice and opposition, for these are the lot of fallen humanity. Christ asks us not to judge where people stand ultimately before God; not to stick our heads in the ground and pretend there is nothing wrong. There have been many devils in the Church, as the long lines of abuse victims can testify, but let us not forget that the actions of abusers are a betrayal what the Church is. Moreover, if they are devils who scoff at the Church from the outside, is the same not true of those who scoff at their brothers and sisters within the Church, who unthinkingly adopt spite rather than true discernment as their mode of relating to others?

 

The second movement

And thus begins Jesus’ refutation of their scoffing nonsense: a house divided against itself cannot stand. Actually, Satan’s house cannot but be divided against itself. It was called to stand for God; it tried instead to stand for itself, its own vainglory and security, and thus it forged a bargain with the malice of dissent, leaving behind the logic of God’s charity. Yet, the temporary unity of those in revolt against God – this is what Jesus here alludes to - is ultimately founded on the shifting sands of radical selfishness and, therefore, of division. According to the poet Yeats in the The Second Coming,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Satan’s house cannot stand against itself, and such as it is, it will fall, as everything founded on sand will fall. The only question for us is whether anything in our own lives risks involving us in that calamitous conclusion. No earthly power will hold us at the centre; no privilege or perfection of our own can prevent the anarchy which sin looses upon our souls if we, in our pitiable turn, choose to scoff like Satan rather than to bless. How can we avoid such an outcome unless we ask ourselves with honesty: where do I make myself weak? For none can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus here refers to Satan, but we can apply the principle to ourselves. Weakened by the flesh, compromising ourselves through the world, we are at every risk of the deceits of the Enemy whenever we try to source our strength in ourselves, rather than in the Almighty.

 

The third movement

And thus comes the conclusion: all sins can be forgiven except the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, i.e. the sin of abandoning hope in the goodness of God, of finding nothing but evil in the works He has wrought to the point that one concludes God has an unclean spirit. This, after all, is the fault that these scribes commit.

And before we find such a conclusion too obscure – for who ascribes such uncleanness to God? - we should observe that this anti-God nihilism surrounds us. It shapes the high, moralistic barracking of contemporary liberalism for which the ten commandments are a kind of genocide against human freedom. To say that God’s law is opposed to human freedom is indeed to say, He has an unclean spirit, for who but an evil God would impose such burdens on His children?

The only response to such accusations is to remember who it is they really accuse, the one who stands accused in this very gospel. My yolk is sweet, and my burden is light, He replies. Heaven forefend that we should hold His law to be too high or too heavy to be kept by His grace, and yet, is this not the meaning of the widespread abandonment of the Christian law around us, where it is assumed that there is such an unbridgeable gulf between our condition and the path He calls us to? That certain human actions are so much part of human nature that God cannot really have intended to forbid them? Here we should remember that encouraging humans to defy God’s command not to eat of a particular fruit was in fact the devil’s original temptation.

All that remains for us to do, therefore, is to offer up our “yes” and “thank you” to the one who can deliver us from the devils around us.  

 

 

Calls from the mountain

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 3: 13-19) narrates on one simple level the calling of the disciples and their appointment as apostles, i.e., as messengers sent out on what was a kind of interim mission to preach and to cast our demons. St Mark names them all too with their aliases: Simon who is Peter and James and John, known as the sons of thunder – surely as an insiders’ joke. St Mark ends the list with the obligatory but difficult reminder of Judas Iscariot, adding soberly who betrayed him. Apart from the last name, this is a roll of honour, even if St Mark’s gospel is replete not only with Peter’s glories but also his humiliations. These were the men that Jesus appointed out of all the sons of Israel: this ragtag band of fishermen, zealots, wealthy tax collectors and poor labourers, extroverts, and introverts, heroes and sometimes cowards, all martyrs in the end, save for Judas the traitor and John who survived his martyrdom to live on into old age. These were the ones that the Father had given to Jesus. These were His beloved disciples in whom He was well pleased.

Behind this roll of honour, however, stands further mysteries for our contemplation. In the first case, this gospel recalls the gospel of Monday this week when, in order to reach Jesus, the friends of the paralysed man needed to ascend to the heavens or at least to the level of the roof tops, thereafter, to descend of course into the house. If you want to see far, go high but, as French writer Georges Bernanos says, note carefully: Quelle paix dans les hauteurs, what peace in the heights! No greater administrative task lay ahead of Jesus than the naming of the twelve, the recruitment of his stewards, the communicating of responsibility for His mission into the hands of mere human beings, be they ever later helped by the sending of the Holy Spirit. And like all great tasks, this task begins with an ascent of the mountain.

 There are some odd, supposedly practical forms of Christianity that claim one can be a practical Christian without such ascents. But can this be true? Christ consistently retreats into prayer throughout the gospel, time and time again, especially in critical moments or junctures. And what this means for us, His disciples now, is clear enough: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too. We must be there then in prayers, on the gentle path and on the windswept mountain, in the harvest fields and in the fallow, in the fervour of devotion and in the bleak breezes of spiritual winter where not even a lowly Rosary seems to quicken our spiritual pulse. If we serve Him, we must follow Him, wherever He is, His servants must be there too.   

From this following of Jesus, moreover, we are in a better place to understand something of the depths behind those simple words:

He called to Him those whom He desired.

There is in such a word at least two further mysteries: the mystery of His desire for us and the mystery of His predilection among us or the selectiveness of His love. Some are called into His inner sanctum; some are relied on to carry His word afar. All live in His intimacy but in such different ways. The mystery of His deep love for every soul does not cancel out the mystery of the variety of ways in which that love is lived at very different levels of participation. From this comes the galactic spectrum of vocations for we are not all called to be the same role, and our various calls reflect His infinite beauties differently, like those many-paned stained-glass windows that admit at once the one source of solar energy but thus illuminate by ten thousand shafts of brilliant light.

And so, He desires us: each and every one in our individuality but also in His likeness, for it is through our resemblance with Him that we show forth our adoption in grace. Twelve individuals at first, then more, and then spreading through Israel and out into the nations. His call goes out: to ascend the mountain first and then to carry the message forth as best we can, before returning at the harvest. In COLW, this pattern is shown to us through the charism where we become like Him (incarnational), draw close to Him (contemplative), carry His word forth (apostolic), and live the good news together (living in community). Our ‘yes’ to this vocation is an echo of Mary’s ‘yes’, all the more so for she was the desire of the King before us all. In this light, we can see why God’s predilection – an idea which runs counter to our contemporary assumptions about equality – actually serves the good of all for the more we belong to God, the more we are available to all: their sister, their brother, in everything following Jesus’ example.

Jesus went up on the mountain. Let us follow Him there.

Wayfarers and beholders

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 2: 18-22) sees Jesus in one of His first exchanges with people. Later on, these questions are deceitful and meant to entrap Him. But this inquiry comes from no particular group and seems to be an honest observation on one particular difference they had noted among Jesus’ disciples: why do they not fast like the disciples of John and the Pharisees? Jesus replies to them with a metaphor, a kind of parable in miniature, in which He is the bridegroom and the disciples His companions. He then evokes two further metaphors - one about repairing fabric and the other about filling wineskins - each no doubt grounded in the culture of the time, but the meaning of which would have been by no means apparent to His listeners. This is a good example of the pedagogy of the Lord; when once we have arrived at the stage where we can ask questions, we should not expect direct answers but rather invitations to come further up and further in. Did we think that fasting was needed? Perhaps it was but we need to consider other factors. Did we think that things would be like they were in the past? Perhaps they should be but there are new matters to be considered. This gospel scene is not so much about the indiscipline of disciples who are not fasting, but rather about the newness that Jesus’ ministry is about to initiate on earth.

Let us begin with this newness. God fulfilled His covenant to the Jews and in doing so sent to earth His Only Beloved Son: Behold I make all things new. (Rev. 21: 5). This too was a matter of the divine pedagogy that aimed to draw one of the fallen peoples of the earth towards the mysteries that the fullness of revelation would eventually disclose, and from them to reveal those mysteries to the entire human race. This was the plan. And the fullness of this revelation is why Jesus’ coming required the weaving of a new fabric, the seamless robe of the Church, in which all sinners could find a place. The fullness of this revelation is the new wine that cannot be decanted into the old wineskins of the Jewish ritual laws, but rather requires the new wineskins provided by the Holy Spirit. All of this is evoked in these two metaphors which, as I say, could only have planted questions rather then provided a solution to the original puzzle of why the disciples were not fasting.

But if the outer structures and gestures of religion were about to change, symbolised by the fabric and the wineskins, the biggest change is indicated by Jesus’ first metaphor of His being the bridegroom. It is easy to imagine that some in the crowd scratched their heads and wondered if he was about to announce his betrothal to some lucky Jewish maid. The more learned among them might have wondered if there was some spiritual significance to what he was saying, for this image of “the bridegroom” is redolent of the Song of Songs, one of the more mysterious books of wisdom in the Old Testament that evoked the relationship with God and his people, and as we now know the betrothal of Christ with the Church, through the metaphors of marriage and sexual desire. Jews were not allowed to study the text until the age of 30, when, one supposes, they were deemed morally continent enough to listen to its teachings.

For those with ears to hear, however, this metaphor of the bridegroom said everything that needed to be said abour how Jesus saw His mission now. At other times in other gospels, He evokes His passionate love and determination in other ways: I come to cast fire upon the earth, and what would I but that it be kindled? (Luke 12: 49). Here, however, the metaphor is not merely abstract, but grounded in the two poles of Christian life: our current distance from God and the confession of God’s passionate love for us that draws us back to Him. And these two poles are themselves approached and marked by the need to fast and the need to be festive.

The fullness of Jesus' revelation later on will help us to understand an intrinsic paradox of our life on this earth. In some ways, we remain wayfarers on the journey whose dangers are not yet passed and whose risks are not yet fully behind us. These are the moments when we realise that we have not yet arrived definitively in the arms of our beloved Saviour. This is why we fast: to do penance for our sins, to chastise our flesh into subjection, and - if for one other reason which we seldom think of - because the bridegroom has gone away. Whatever the motives for human joy and indeed for spiritual joy, the bridegroom has gone away and is not yet returned.

But if we are wayfarers, the revelation of Jesus shows us the extent to which the Father's plan is to temper the difficulties of our condition by placing us already in the presence of the One to whom all our journey directs us. And His presence amongst us is multiple: in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar, the source and summit of the Church’s life; in the words of Sacred Scripture, committed to us through the gift of the Church (for, as St Augustine says in his letter to Manichaeus, I would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do so); in our hearts through grace where the Blessed Trinity dwells; in our neighbour in all their distress and in whom we find His image and likeness; and, why not, as St Francis found, in the world of nature created by His hand.

Has then the bridegroom truly gone away? Indeed He has, but only to allow the mission of the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to shape and mature what the Son had planted, to sanctify it and make it holy, and bring it to the fullness of life and love, as once He did in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

 The bridegroom has gone away, and we must fast. But if we only look around us, like the separated lovers we are, we will find the presence of the Divine Spouse everywhere.