Casting light in our darkness

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

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 2-11) shows us two contrasting scenes, both of which cast a light on our faith in the coming of Christ, our Saviour. In the first scene, the disciples of John the Baptist approach Jesus and ask Him, apparently at John’s behest, whether He was the One who was to come. John did not send them for his own satisfaction; he knew full well who was to come, had been familiar with His coming since his earliest infancy, and likewise must have known the dignity of his aunt whose visits were always a blessing beyond all hope in the house of John’s parents Elizabeth and Zachariah. Rather, John sent his disciples to Jesus to learn what they needed to know in order, finally, to abandon the path of the Baptist, and follow Jesus instead. In the second scene, which immediately follows, Jesus asks the crowds, who had gone to see John previously, what it was that they saw in him – a reed shaken by the wind, or a man clothed in soft garments? The possibilities are ironic and deliberately provocative. Answering His own question, Jesus concludes by revealing John’s real identity as the prophet of the Messiah.  Jesus affirms, again with an enigmatic paradox, that John was great but not as great as the least in the kingdom of heaven.

In this complex scene, what is it that the Lord seeks to teach us? We might say it is something about the complexity of vision and the need for faith before the approaching mysteries of His coming into the world. For in the first instance, John’s disciples are invited to look at the plain evidence: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, leapers are cleansed and the deaf hear. There were an increasing number of recipients of such miracles in the days of Jesus: those who had been once afflicted and now walked free of their burdens. This was tangible evidence of who Jesus was, not least because it was a fulfilment of prophecy, for these were the very signs the prophesied Messiah was meant to produce. Jesus came to build a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, but its fruits spilt over into the material world, and the healing from sin brought with it healing from the other disorders of this life. His invitation to John’s disciples, therefore, was for them to look and see; not to ignore the obvious; not to turn their eyes from the evidence on the basis that perhaps there was another explanation for what they saw. The challenge to them was to be simple, for it is perhaps one of the sins of the devout, as John’s disciples were, to be too complex, too involved in theological wrangling and minutiae. Their tendencies were those of the learned, and they needed this lesson of simple observation to set them free.

The lesson of the Lord to the crowds, however, is quite different. For the sin of the crowd, of the generally undevout, is not to be too complicated but to be too shallow; to be so immersed in this world that they cannot see beyond the surface level; to be so unreflective that they ricochet off the atmosphere of the mysteries before them. To the casual observer, driven on by no more than sensation-seeking curiosity, perhaps John appeared as a reed shaken by the wind, a wild and insubstantial thing; a creature of the desert, a holy mad man. John’s attraction for the shallow observer could have been the attraction that all curiosities hold for the vulgar crowd. So, Jesus shakes them with His question, and then He follows home with some of His often-searing irony:

What did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft garments? Behold those who wear soft garments are in kings’ houses.  

But what is going on here if not that Jesus is now wrong-footing them, passing from one extreme to the other? Any half decent teacher should immediately spot the tactic: show the shallow ones some obviously wrong answers, and they have a chance of alighting on the right one. And then the right one comes as the fulfilment of the prophecy:

Behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.

In citing these words of Malachi, Jesus is saying that John is the prophet, and, if not yet that He Himself is the Christ, at least that the Christ is among them. The people would have to join up the dots for themselves, especially those who had heard Jesus’ reply to John’s disciples.

Today’s gospel then offers us these contrasting lessons. John’s disciples must approach the mystery of His coming through simplicity. They have vision but it needs to become focused. The crowd in contrast must approach this mystery through coming alive to faith. They have their reason and their wits, but they need to be enriched.

There are lessons for ourselves in both regards. Those who are devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient humility; perhaps they are mislead into the shallows by believing their learning will be enough, as if Divine Revelation were a communication package and not an invitation to a divine communion. Those who are not devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient faith; they barely approach the waters of the divine mysteries, believing that worldly insight will be enough, as if in this life God were another system to game, like all the others.

And, so why, in Jesus’ concluding remarks, was the least in the kingdom of heaven greater than John? Here, Jesus leaves the crowd, and John’s disciples if they were still in earshot, with a paradox that again is an invitation. There they were, awaiting the coming of the Prince of Peace who was expected to sweep away the enemies of Israel, and here was the Messiah, now revealing Himself in an unexpected mystery of divine humility. Jesus is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven simply because He makes Himself the least, the servant of all, emptying out His dignity to walk among us, to eat with us, and even to lie in the filthy surroundings of a tumbledown dwelling among animals, like the poorest of the poor. For this is how He intends to break through our complexity and our shallowness, our pride and our self-sufficiency, and to cast some light into our darkness to reveal to us the eternal depths of the love of the Father who sent Him to save us and bring us home.  

He ain't heavy

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

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 28-30) is an extract from a longer address of the Lord in which He berates the towns of Israel who had heard His preaching and not repented. Woe unto them, is His searing message – no sweetening of the pill from the Lord of all sweetness. And then comes this gentle coda to the chapter, a word of kindness to His little ones: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. … For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

We are unsure of how to take these words that on their surface are so inviting. Is this how it is really, Lord, we wonder? Can it be this straightforward? It seems all the harder to believe Jesus in this instance because our own experience apparently contradicts His infallible word. After all, if being a disciple were that easy, why aren’t more of us saints? Why aren’t more of us simply just competent at bearing the yoke of the Lord? We remember His other injunction of course: if any man will be my disciple, he must deny himself, take us his cross and follow me… How are we to square this with the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden? We gaze at the sky and we wonder: does it all depend on what mood He is in? How is this so, Lord?

But what we fail to see or to appreciate is that it is not Jesus’ burden that is heavy; it is not His yoke that makes things such a struggle for us; rather, it is our own. Jesus says Follow me, and along we wish to go. But the trouble with us is that we want to bring all our stuff with us, mostly unconsciously although not always. Committing to Him in our grandiloquent prayers, we unconsciously bring our self-centredness with us, our latent assumptions about who are number 1 and number 2 around here (me and Jesus of course). We make our donations to the Lord, and then, in a perverse tribute to His advice, we do not let our righthand see that our lefthand is holding back from giving what it needs to give. Our supposed all is in the end only a fraction. In other words, deep down we give half-heartedly. We want to have our cake and eat it. We love without surrender, and we sacrifice only with calculation.

And thus, we feel the cross and the burdens are heavy. We know none of the lightness that possessed the soul of Jesus, even in His desolation on the Cross. Centred on ourselves, all the forces of the sinner’s gravity weigh on our shoulders; and thus, unwittingly, we are the cause of most of our grief. Our souls bathe not in a liquor of gratitude but in a stew of when will it endism? We feel we deserve better; we have not really considered what we are owed.

Human nature does not change down the ages. It is very much as the fourth-century St Augustine put it in his prayer for Holy Communion:

 

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

 

And, Augustine himself acknowledges in the prayer our inconstancy in resolution:

 

In time of correction we confess our wrongdoing: after Thy visitation we forget that we have wept.

If Thou stretchest forth Thy hand, we promise amendment; if Thou withholdest the sword, we keep not our promise.

 

How then, we wonder, can we know the lightness of His burden and the easiness of His yoke? Here we must surrender to the divine pedagogy, to the training that He offers us every day, making - like Mary our Model - our yes and thank you to Him and in every minute of every day. Deep down, His pedagogy enacts that one great command that Jesus issued to His fisherman followers: put out into the deep. Let go and surrender. In other words, believe the gospel, embrace the path and all that it means for us as individuals … with our own wounds and attachments.

Unless we are gifted by some special grace, this is not the work of one day or one night; it is not the work of one prayer or one retreat. How could we learn of Him – the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end – in so short a time? Through this slow discipleship, the reality of our becoming Him, conformed to His image, becoming an icon of the Father to others, can be seen in all its incarnational reality.

Only slowly do we set down our own burdens, shed our false selves, and become the dream that the Father had of us from all time. Only gradually will we know just how light and easy are the burdens of Christ. And then, and only then, please God, He will give us rest.

  

Making straight the way of the Lord

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

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 3:1-12) shows us scenes from the ministry of St John the Baptist, the one who came to make straight the way of the Lord. Like a distant prophetic figure out of the Old Testament – in a sense, the last of the Old Testament prophets who all point forward to Christ – St John, the cousin of the Lord, calls the listening Israelites to repentance, urges them to do good, and to be mindful of the eternal consequences of their actions. In the most alarming metaphors, He predicts, moreover, the figure of the Christ who will baptise the people with the Holy Spirit and fire, and winnow the good from the evil in an eternal settlement of justice. There are many ways in which such a scene and such messages could be approached. Yet one theme that strikes the reader today is what we might see as St John the Baptist’s call to reality: his call to sinners to see the reality about themselves and the reality of the stakes of this life.

Who am I and, even, why am I not that other person? Hardly anybody ask themselves these things explicitly, but they are inquiries that underlie our earliest sense of self. The waters of the self soon become muddied through our engagement with sin, and then, our waywardness, the result of the wounds of original sin, becomes compounded by our growing inability to face the truth about the mistakes we have made. As Hilaire Belloc says in one bitingly satirical poem:

If you have luck you find in early youth

How dangerous it is to tell the Truth.

Especially, we might add, the truth about ourselves. St John the Baptist addresses the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but when he calls them a brood of vipers, he is speaking to us through them. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, he advises them, as he advises us all. But the mould and blight of self-deception lies in various thicknesses upon our otherwise fruitful actions. How well do we know ourselves? Better than we think, most likely, for otherwise, we would have no instinct for covering up our deceits, if not with outright lies, then with our reverse-engineered justifications, the false trails we lay for others to still believe in us. And when we do these things, we make ourselves the children of the Father of Lies whose writhing form is sometimes depicted beneath the feet of the Virgin Mother. When Moses made a serpent of brass and hung it on the crotch of a tree to cure the Israelites of the poisonous snake bites, his action symbolised that the Christ would look like any other viper or sinner, and yet He would bring not poison but a cure. We are not so evil as to be beyond redemption; there is a cure for us. But neither are we so good as to be able to free ourselves easily from the entanglements of self-deception, from our lack of realism. We must, as St Teresa of Avila tells us, eat the bread of self-knowledge with every meal. Knowing who we are is part of the road back towards God, for it was by a category error about ourselves – wishing to be as gods – that we left the path that He had fixed for us originally.

And if St John the Baptist calls us to be realists about ourselves, he also calls us back to reality over the consequences of our actions. As we reflected on in a recent post, time rises in our hearts like the crest of a mountain on either side of which lie the eternal destinies of the good and the wicked. We enjoy with our faculty of freedom the possibility of getting home but we incur the risk of getting lost on the way. And this freedom is meant for something. St John’s metaphors depict Jesus as a farmer who winnows his harvest in search of the good grain; we belong to the divine orchard and are destined to bear fruit or to be felled. In other words, ours is a qualified freedom; we are free for something. God did not make us free to invent our own selfish worlds but to share freely in His world of unquenchable goodness. There may have been a time when Catholics were taught too brutally about these eternal risks, like children of neurotic parents taught to live in a state of constant emotional trauma. But now we have run to the other extreme where God is either an indulgent Sugar Daddy, benignly satisfied with the gift of our distracted attention, or a cool bro who would never do anything so evil as to hold us to account. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire, promises the prophet of the Lord. When did we last hear that message? We are fools if we do not reflect on it from time to time, as the Exercises of St Ignatius urge us to.

These are the means by which St John tries to make the way straight for the Lord. If our ears are to be opened to the good news to come, we need self-knowledge; we need to shed the lies with which we comfort ourselves and face our worse selves only to bring them to the healing touch of Christ. He is an orchardist on the look out for unfruitful trees, but He is also the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep. He is not in the end a farming merchant or trader but a Father, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

And, likewise, if our hearts are to accept the call that He offers us and that we wish to attend to, we must reflect often on the eternal vistas that stretch away on either side of the crest of time upon which we walk: to the right, the everlasting hills of the divine country which bathe our hearts in the light of hope, and to the left, the unfathomable lake of fire, as seen in St John the Apostle’s vision.

As the great Fulton Sheen said, reflecting on the crosses of the criminals that stood either side of the innocent Christ: Let us not presume: one thief remained unrepentant. Let us not despair; one thief stole heaven. 

From signs to silence

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

****

Today’s gospel (Mark 16:15-20) gives us the last scene in the gospel of St Mark, setting out Jesus’ final command to the apostles to preach the gospel, and promising that their work would be accompanied by miracles and signs. Then the Lord is taken into heaven where, St Mark tells us, He sits at the right hand of God, while the apostles went out to preach the good news.  

The launch of the Church in the wake of Pentecost was, as someone has said, like the launch of some great rocket from Cape Canaveral, the noise and fire of the engines like the roar of the Holy Ghost into history; the power, the grace under pressure of the generations of martyrs to come and their often miraculous actions like the imposing profile of technological majesty, projecting itself into the sky in the sight of the whole world. St Mark’s gospel is the simplest and most straightforward of the gospel narratives, and yet it does not shy away in this final chapter from the power and immensity of the Redeemer of the human race.

For this is the first thing to note about such powers: that like all gifts, they are the fruit of the abundance of Christ. When Christ walked the earth, power flowed out of Him even at His merest touch. Bonum diffusivum est – goodness shares itself, the ancient Greek principle, was later adopted by St Thomas and the other scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, but it captures something of the overflowing nature of God’s loving kindness, of the God who makes the sun and rain to come on the evil as well as on the good, of the God who works the miracles of history, as well as the mysterious wonders that happen only in private.

Jesus’ charismatic gifts, however, His ability to work miracles and do astounding feats: these are something more, especially when they are gifted to mere mortals. Faith, hope, charity, and all the other gifts of God are essential to our sanctification. In contrast, miracles, locutions, visions, bilocation, or whatever extraordinary signs the apostles and other have worked: these are not for the sanctification of the individual but for the sanctification of others.

There is then this paradox of holy displacement according to which the signs which are most associated with the holiness of a person are in fact not the gifts that make them holy. This paradox is most exquisitely realised in the life of the Virgin Mary who, apart from a touch of prophecy at the time of the Magnificat, achieved no extraordinary signs or actions in her life. Yet later on, there she stands, queen of apostles, and queen of martyrs, the greatest of the witnesses of Christ, the ark of the new covenant and the new gate of heaven. Her miracles will come of course but not until she sits in glory beside her Son by the throne of the Almighty Father.  

So important are these charismatic gifts that, except for the category of martyr, the Church demands them as a sign from any individual to whom the faithful wish to attribute sainthood. And yet, is it not also true that some of the greatest saints, like Mary, follow a path of apparent obscurity, of a profound silence, without show, without demonstrable signs of wonder? This is surely true of the mightiest French saint of them all, St Therese of Lisieux, the obscure Normand Carmelite who died of tuberculosis at 24 in a country rent by extreme culture wars against the Church, and who ever since has inspired Catholics the world over and obtained so many miracles through her intercession. In the end, all the baptised, every single one of us, are called to become an image of Christ through whom we are adopted of the Father, yet we do this in our distinct ways. Some may indeed work miraculous signs, like Christ in the pomp of His ministry; others are reduced to weakness and helplessness, like Christ in His hidden life or in the moment of His terrible passion.

The question then is not whether we live up to the most spectacular embodiment of Christ, but whether we are faithfully listening to, and doggedly following, the vocation that the Lord issues to us, the path that is carved by the streams of grace in our soul, revealing that particular beauty of the Trinity that it is our calling to reflect. Follow me, Christ says; and wherever the Master goes, there must the disciple follow. Some will follow Him in His glory and astound the world, making manifest the power of the Lord; in contrast, others will follow Him as they follow the mute Lamb, the voiceless victim of sin, the silent Man of Sorrows despised. For as Fr Manley Hopkins wrote:

 

Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire).

Living on the edge

 An audio version of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed via this link.

****

Before we begin, this is just a warning that the blog will shift to Sundays and Wednesdays, starting from 30 November, the first Sunday of Advent in the new liturgical year.  

Today’s gospel (Luke 21: 29-33) crowns the series of Jesus’ complex prophecies about the end times – complex, not because His language is difficult, but because these prophecies refer to different historical events, at least from a human perspective. We like our histories linear and neat, not interwoven and cast under an eternal light. And yet we find Jesus inviting us to another point of view which is ultimately the standpoint of eternity. Here, God lives among men.

There are at least three ends of the world evoked in the gospels during this season: the end of the world at the end of time, anticipating the return of the Son of Man and the last judgement; the end of the Jewish world of the Old Testament with the sacking of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people; and lastly – since death is for every individual the end of their own world – the end of every individual’s moment under the sun, the point at which the pilgrim in this world reaches the end of their natural life or perhaps has it taken from them.

What does Jesus mean then that when the disciples see all these signs, they will know that the kingdom of God is near them? Is it just possible that while these signs will have their historic fulfilment, there is another layer of meaning to them? Strangely, few of the signs He has evoked in these passages are distinctive or unique. There have always been wars and famines, there have often been earthquakes and plagues. Jerusalem has frequently been surrounded by armies from empires and neighbouring countries, from the sands of Arabia or from the green fields of Europe, ordered to go there by Roman consuls, Ottoman sultans, French kings, and British imperial governments. How is it then that the kingdom of God can be identified if all the signs for it surround the disciples of Jesus in an undifferentiated cacophony? Where is our liberation when the dreadful signs of the end appear to be signs of the middle and the beginning as well?

But perhaps Jesus seeks here to wrongfoot the disciples’ taste for the spectacular. When will it be, they wonder? When, indeed? The answer is not then but now. Instead of making all these prophesies, Jesus might easily have said: when you see the sun rising, when the bird is on the air, when the sea laps the shore, when nature slumbers at night and wakes by day, then you will know that the kingdom of God is near. It is a divine tease. In other words, don’t await the drama, the crisis of the final cataclysm, although these things will come. Instead, O that today you would listen to His voice, harden not your hearts.

For the boundaries with eternity cross not only some future historical timeline but intersect the heart of every living, breathing human being. Time rises like the crest of a mountain line, giving way on the one side to the country of God and on the other to the lake of fire in St John’s vision in the Book of Revelation. God, who is omnipresent, upholds in being every thinking intelligence in the universe, angelic, human, and demonic. How can it not be that eternity thereby crosses our very thoughts and haunts our desires, even for those who have rejected Him?

But this eternity is not an endless time but an ever-present now, already unfolded and made vital through God’s very life in which we are merely sharers: all sharers in His being, some – those who accept Him – sharers in His friendship and love. Eternity thus is not at the end of our lives but stands in some overarching dome that encompasses us and, if we are open to it, fills our hearts with its promise and its riches.

And this is why, properly considered, there is no such thing as the humdrum. All the boredom and weariness of life is a deception; we have a window on eternity, but we fail to keep it clean. All flight towards the humdrum is in fact a flight from this ever-present eternity; all flight towards the humdrum is in a sense a refusal to bear with the eternal being who wants to be so close to us; we engage instead in false attempts to give meaning to our lives when they are severed from this eternal perspective. The kingdom is near to us when we see these signs, but the real question is: are we near to the kingdom? Are we prepared to look upon it and see it with the joyous eyes of Mary, with a heart full of festivity at His love made tangible, even in the simple tasks of a humble reality unadorned by the finer things?

Of course, we are wounded and need the Lord’s mercy. We are as yet convalescent; surprised and grateful beneficiaries of the kindness of the Divine Samaritan. But if we look to the windows that open constantly on eternity, how we should put to flight the burdens of our sickroom and the weariness of the everyday to rejoice and say ‘yes’ to the Lord in every moment of our lives!

The Jesus and Mary Co-op

A recording of today's gospel and blog is accessible via this link.

***

Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 46-50) is of the briefest but its meaning runs deep. The Mother of God and some of Jesus’ wider family are seeking to speak to Jesus, and Jesus seems to respond with a rather detached, almost disrespectful remark: those who do the will of my Father in heaven are my brother, sister, and mother.

No doubt today’s gospel is meat and drink to those who prefer to see Mary as a kind of holy “girl next door”, a folksy mother earth figure with a swish of hippie non-judgmentalism about her. It is the kind of image of Mary that is calculated not to frighten. And yet, as maternal as she is, we do Mary wrong if we do not recall that the Roman liturgy once evoked her in the terms used in the Song of Songs:

Who is this that looks forth like the dawn,

    fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

And why should the Mother of God not be so evoked, she who is also Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs, Queen of Confessors?

So, why does Jesus respond as He does in today’s gospel, in a manner that might almost suggest He no more believes in family bonds than one of Mao’s Red Guards?

 

First, we probably should see this response in the context of its time in Israel. In a context where family ties and tribal identity are everything, Jesus is launching a gospel of spiritual kinship that transcends all earthly belongings. One can imagine the way in which perhaps well-meaning persons might have announced the coming of His mother, implying that Jesus had to drop everything and run outside. In this context, His words are not disrespect to His Mother but a reminder of the foundation of the kinship of grace that underpins all the work of the New Covenant in His blood.

But we can also take these words in another sense: that she became His mother precisely because she was the one who did the will of the Father. The destiny of Mary lies in the coming together of her predestination in grace from the heart of the Trinity and her free cooperation with that call when it came. Here we stand at the centre of that mystery which is her fiat, her free consent to God’s plans, the transformation of her life that makes her the beachhead of a divine and gentle invasion of the world to liberate us all from the chains of sin. This is why the liturgy in the Middle Ages looked on her as the figure in the Song of Songs:

fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

It is not that she is a power in and of herself. Rather, by her free cooperation with God, by her resolve to do the will of the Father in heaven, she initiates this return to God through the grace and redemption of her Son. She achieves in that moment a status that is the reverse of our unhappy mother Eve, becoming a second Eve to the redeeming second Adam. What enables her to fulfil this role is her availability and openness to God, sustained by her virtues of obedience and humility, and crowned by her thankfulness and joy, especially the joy of the Annunciation

First of my joys – their foundation and origin,

Root of mankind’s gracious redemption,

as the Pinsent Ballad says.

What is so reassuring about this is that Mary’s joy is not hers exclusively but becomes available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, as she did. Mary’s joy that led her to accompany Christ to Calvary was not hers exclusively but is also available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, bearing their cross after Jesus. She goes ahead, our Queen and our Mother, because gifted to us as such from the cross by our Redeemer.

Jesus is no lonely Greek hero, a figure of egoistic self-glorification. By making us fellow children and heirs with Him, He calls us – and Mary first of all – to make up in our selves that portion of redemption that is still unfulfilled. In other words, Mary could have said these words even before St Paul wrote them:

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. (Col 1: 24)

Can anything be lacking in Christ’s sufferings? Yes, our free cooperation with His battle campaign, our free shouldering of the burden of redemption, which makes up for what is lacking in His not because our effort is worthy purely in and of itself, but because His grace transforms our least act of good will into a weapon of His love, conquering not only our own hearts but the hearts of all those belonging to His mystical body.

The very heart of our restoration in grace, of our spiritual lives, and our path back to the Father, is traced out for us in the likeness that Christ establishes in our souls. We are Sons and Daughters of the Father with and through Him, and Mary first of all; we are priests, prophets and kings with and through Him, and Mary first of all; we collaborate in our redemption and the redemption of others with and through Him, and Mary first of all; Mary the faithful one, Mary who said the first yes of the new dawn of redemption.

And this is why in COLW she is our model: a model of availability, openness, and teachability; a model of collaborating in redemption for the sake of His body the Church; a model even of our sorrows on earth, and please God, of our eternal joys.

  

Melting pride

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

****

In today’s gospel (Luke 22: 24-30) we leap forward to a scene from the Last Supper in which Jesus hears the apostles arguing over who will be the greatest among them. His rebuke to them is instant, and He explains to them this Christian paradox: that the one who would be first must be last. Nevertheless, He outlines also the dignity of their own calling as apostles through which they will become the judges of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The great wound or burden that the apostles here show is similar to the fault that brought about the fall of our first parents: the sin of pride. Pride comes before a fall, according to the old saying. We might correct this and say: pride came before the fall. Yet the reason the pride was so disastrous is precisely because it overturns the fundamental relationship between ourselves and our Creator who is the source and foundation of all reality. Pride is in the will, of course, as is all sin, but in humans it involves an error in the mind and deviations in our sense of self and our social need for respect or esteem. In its most demonic manifestation, it is about a refusal of our creatureliness, our dependence upon almighty God, who holds us in being, and from whom all our gifts come. Arguably in its most human manifestation, it is the fruit of an unregulated neediness, the appetite to see in others their need for what we are, a kind of lust for significance, as if without it we would not be who we are. I am who I think others think I am, is how one psychological theory sums up the twisted logic on which pride and vainglory seem to live.

In this light perhaps we can appreciate now the power of Jesus’ command to the apostles: Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. What is it that the youngest knows or desires, and what is it that the servant brings? How can we not find in such a precept an echo of Jesus’ other words: learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart? For, who is the ‘youngest’ in this case if not this little child, the Son of God? It is this child, the one who in time will be born to us, who knows the Father and in the same eternal moment knows the loving gaze of the Father upon Him. If then, like Him, we were to contemplate long enough the loving gaze that this Father casts upon those who have been made His children in baptism, would we not find it much more difficult to lust after the esteem of any other gaze? Why would we, like the apostles, desire the stoney picnic of society’s approval if we had feasted on the loving kindness of our God who desires the world so much that He sent His only Son to redeem it?

It is perhaps this love also which drives the true servant to serve. For the eyes of the servant should not be upon the other guests but upon the Master of the House who has first looked upon them with love. Again, like the youngest child, this servant is firstly the One who came to serve His Father by serving us, His unworthy guests, the One whose sandal we are not fit to untie? And if Jesus tells us to take the place of the servant, He is essentially telling us once more: follow me. For where the Master is, there must the servant follow.

The pride and vainglory of the apostles today melts in the face of the example of Jesus’ humility, the Jesus who both gives them the words of eternal life, and bows to wash the feet of His Father’s guests. Yet standing behind this great example of humility in Jesus is the unquenchable love that pours forth from the Blessed Trinity, the love that Mary confessed in hr Magnificat, for Jesus serves us to please only His Father in heaven whose love the Song of Songs tells us of in these terms:

 

The voice of my beloved!

    Look, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,

    bounding over the hills.

 My beloved is like a gazelle

    or a young stag.

Look, there he stands

    behind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,

    looking through the lattice.

 My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

    and come away;

 for now the winter is past,

    the rain is over and gone.

 The flowers appear on the earth;

    the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove

    is heard in our land.

 The fig tree puts forth its figs,

    and the vines are in blossom;

    they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,

    and come away.

 (Song of Song 2: 8-13)

These are the words addressed to every pride-filled heart that gorges on a poison of overpriced esteem and misplaced desire and who remains unresponsive to divine love received.

 

My love is love unknown, my Saviour’s love to me.

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

 

And with such a gaze of love upon us, how can we hunger for anything less?

Who are you and who am I?

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

****

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.

****

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.