Seeking the face of God

An audio version of today's gospel can be accessed here.

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 12-14) offers us once more a lesson in many layers. On the surface, it is a simply matter of whom one extends charity to: Jesus tells one of the leading Pharisees not to invite desirable guests to his dinners but the humanly undesirable ones, so that his reward will be given him in terms of eternal merit, not some earthly currency.  This teaching follows the lesson in Matthew chapter 6 when Jesus warns His listeners not to practise their virtues ostentatiously in front of others:

When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then, your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Yet this is not so much about whom one invites to dinner or whom one extends one’s charity to, as about the motives behind such actions.

Jesus does not, for example, mean that people should not invite friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbours at all, as if the standard of the gospel were not so much to love the poor as to deliberately offend the wealthy. There are the physically poor and lame, and then there are the spiritually poor and lame; the former benefit from our corporal works of mercy, while the latter from our spiritual works of mercy. They may sometimes be the same person!

Of course, Jesus Himself deliberately offends against the niceties of the Pharisees but His aim is not to give offence, so much as to offer two further lessons.

The first of these is for the Pharisees whom we should understand as those devout in their religion, and the lesson is not to do the done thing, so much as the thing that is pleasing to God. The Pharisees seem to have operated like a select club; appearances were important; conformism was expected; a judging eye for failures in observance was simply de rigueur; unity mattered more than justice; and as for cover-ups, they were probably considered a duty. All of these tendencies reflect what happens to religion when it seems to become skin deep, enmeshed in shallow priorities, attached to a kind of performative, self-congratulatory perfectionism. This kind of religion is up with the latest trends or else it is all ears for the voices of the right-minded people. Pharisaism invented virtue signalling long before the twenty-first century adherents of what some call moralistic, therapeutic deism, the touchy-feely and intolerant version of Christianity that loves the Way but neglects the Truth and the Life of the gospel. Jesus’ reproaches to the Pharisees offer a standing rebuke to every devout soul who becomes absorbed not in God but in their own service of God.

But if we should not do the done thing, what then is pleasing to God? This is the second lesson to take on board here. Ultimately, as we noted in last Friday’s gospel, and in Sunday’s gospel, what is pleasing to God is that we should love Him above all things, seeking His face and yearning for it. St Augustine of Hippo summed it up nearly four hundred years after Christ walked the earth:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

This then was the challenge for the Pharisees, as it is for ourselves. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves. No matter our levels of piety or regular devotion, the battle is not done. It wages on, even as we seek the face of the Lord. The terrible thing about total self-surrender to God is that it may not be half so pretty as all the regular practices, the pious statuary, and the romantic imaginings our minds prefer to conjure. It may involve something as cruel and painful as wrongful condemnation, a tortured final mile, and an agonising death on a rain-soaked hill of humiliation. But perhaps it is much harder to find the face of God in the darkness if we have not become accustomed to finding the face of God in the ordinary world that surrounds us, or even in those aspects of the human world that repel us. There is the peace of God that keeps us – united in love with a common purpose and a common mind: the mind of Christ.

For the Pharisee, it was never wrong to invite the rich and famous to supper. It was only wrong not to seek the face of God and to yearn for it in the dinner guests, yearning instead for the earthly gain that such company seemed to offer. For the Pharisees, Jesus’ counsel to invite the humanly undesirable guests was only ever a way of removing that temptation from the table so that their souls could journey towards God, rather than sinking more deeply into the mire of their own self love.

It is mostly easy to spot the temptations of the world and the devil around us. What is more difficult to spot is the more insidious temptations that our own self-love draws into the very fabric of our religion, making a parody of the kingdom of God within us.

The alternative is to seek the face of God and yearn for it, in every moment of our lives like Mary. For there is the peace of God.

Rejoice and be glad

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

***

Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:1-12) could be easily mistaken for a set of moral injunctions. When Jesus says blessed are the meek or blessed are the peacemakers, He seems to be telling us to be meek and peaceable. And so He is … but that that is not all. That these precepts are not merely a set of moral injunctions becomes apparent in other parts of this discourse.

Happy are those who mourn; happy the pure in heart; happy those who are persecuted. These are not prescriptions for behaviour. Rather they are about the inner transformation of the disciples. And the inner transformation of the disciples is not purely a moral agenda but a spiritual one; we might even say, a mystical one.

Which is as much to say that the following of Jesus is not like membership in a club whose rules we observe. The following of Jesus is more like a spousal relationship in which our very hearts are moulded in a new way.

Invite your spouse the Paraclete to make of our hearts a living Holy House.

The truth is that we either want this or not. But too often, we commit to it on the surface but do not accept it in some parts of our hearts. This is of course because we are not yet poor in spirit, preferring instead the satisfactions we derive from the chintz curtain arrangements of our reputations and our supermarket-value pleasures. Hoodwinked into thinking our intentions have been pure, we then find every excuse to dodge the responsibilities that fall upon us, all the while asking the very Mother of God to pray that the Holy Spirit would transform us like He once transformed her humble house in Nazareth. The cheek of it! I mean, the sheer cheek of it!

But we do not fail because we cannot to live up to the standard. We fail because we are still too actively building the city of man in our hearts instead of letting Him build the city of God. We fail because some parts of our hearts have not really surrendered to the Father’s forming action. It is not because we are weak; when our hearts have ceased to choose sin openly, we still act out our selfishness in more subtle ways, assuming instinctively that we can realise those beatitudes by our own powers. And then of course we realise we are weak but not in the way we thought. Ultimately, that is because we have still not grasped the fullness of the call to life and love, the call to the fullness of joy, and the call to wholeness, and let these calls - His calls - fill the sails of our souls.

What power on earth could make us rejoice and be glad when we are abused and persecuted and when people speak calumny against us? We could only rejoice in such circumstances if the treasure of our hearts was truly the love of God, and it only becomes our treasure through His gift. The beatitudes are not, as I said above, a set of moral injunctions. They are rather a map of the transformation of those souls who are so deeply in love with God that their hearts and minds are already living the life of the blessed, steeped in the immense love that can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Are we right to aspire to this? Are we right to think that this could be the reality of our own lives? Jesus has no doubts about this. He has already said: follow me. He has already said: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

And then, when we love Him, we will find him everywhere: smiling at us through the crowd as the busyness of our days pulls us apart, shedding tears we can wipe away from the face of a neighbour, asking too much of us through some needy client, only to help us surrender more to the urging of His love; waiting for us in the prayers we offer before the tabernacle, as in those snatched from the dimness of some half sleep.

Rejoice and be glad for your reward will be great in heaven. The more our hearts belong to Him under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the more that rejoicing and gladness become ours even now.

Prayer up hill and down dale

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 12-19) sees the appointment of the ‘apostles’ who become a select group among Jesus’ many disciples. We also see how the people from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Sidon flocked to hear Him preach and to beg His aid. It must have been quite a sight, not least because, as this gospel extract attests, power came out of Him that cured them all. It was not that Jesus was a mere miracle worker; His very presence generated miracles. Jesus was not just a person but an event!

Yet perhaps the most spectacular part of today’s gospel is its opening line:

Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and He spent the whole night in prayer to God. 

In the light of these words, for example, we can place the events of the following day in their true perspective. Jesus appointed apostles, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. Jesus went among the crowd that had gathered to see, hear, and be cured by Him, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. The prospect of the heroic prayer of Jesus should put to flight the many excuses we find not to pray; our shortage of time, our many pressing duties; the priorities of immediacy over the enduring value of the eternal which, in our human calculations, can be covered by prayer tomorrow just as well as by prayer today. If we somehow, in some weird place in our heads, think our need for prayer is not that great today (because, you know, we are pretty devout anyway), by the same cheap measure we should wonder why Jesus needed to pray all night long. I mean: who needed to pray less than Jesus? 

But this is, as I say, a cheap measure. If we only pray like customers at the jumble sale of divine favours, we are like those religious believers whose prayers seek to forge currency rather than communion; something to trade with rather than to live in. Our conscious minds need prayer like our bodies need food, in regular rhythms of activity and rest. But our unconscious minds need prayer like we need oxygen. Changing Charlotte Mason’s dictum about education, we might say prayer is an atmosphere, a disciple, and a life. Prayer’s atmosphere surrounds us and holds us in being; prayer’s discipline encourages the harmonising of our inner life with the pulse of the Eternal Father – if that metaphor can be allowed; and prayer’s life fills us up, for to pray as we ought is to pray like Christ. Jesus prays all night; would that we could too; would that we could find the path that leads to those heights where He plays before the Father of us all. At the very least we can try to be open to His gifts of prayer, whether they lead us to the desert or to the hills.

For that too is important. He surely prayed often enough for His daily bread, as He taught us to do. But His delight was to pray in the hills, closer to the eternal mysteries, as it were; from Tabor to Calvary, from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon from the Cross, Jesus often reveals the sublime to us on elevated ground. In these events, Jesus is always an example, even though He is always an exception. His possession of the Beatific Vision meant He had no need to go to the hills; and yet He goes to the hills to pray, perhaps suggesting to us how we should fly the lowlands of our distractions, the busyness of our overworked brains with their dizzying engagements, in search of the rest and recollection we desperately need before God; an unmet need we are insensible to, like the unfelt hunger of a starving man. From these heights, we have a chance to see things for what they really are; from these heights we can beg the grace to see them as God sees them in their eternal light; not in the garishly blinding dimness of workaday desperation.

And then He spent the whole night in prayer. It would be wrong to see this only as a quantitative statement: the whole night as opposed to a half or quarter of it. Unless we are the parents of babies or small children, the point is that, so often, while our day belongs to others, our nights belong to ourselves, nature’s reward for the labours behind us. And here is Jesus, giving His whole night – the one thing that does not belong to His followers - to the Father instead. For to spend the whole night in prayer for Jesus is to do no more than to rest secure in His belonging entirely to the Father. The Father and I are one. Of course, many of us experience unwelcome wakefulness in the night; it is as if our day is robbing our night in the interests of worry and fretfulness. Yet, as we know, wherever the Master is, there His disciples are bound to follow. A broken night feels tangibly like an invitation to follow Him in suffering; but perhaps it would be more fruitful – perhaps more encouraging – to see the fragments of a broken night as an invitation to hear the call to give ourselves wholly and entirely to Him who gave Himself wholly and entirely to us and to the Father in His nights of prayer. 

Then, lastly, comes the unspoken part of the gospel: when day came, before He summoned His disciples, He must have descended those hills. Once we are up there, we do not want to come down, like the three apostles who wanted to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It is good for us to be there. It seems good to us to stay there.

And yet, as we followed Jesus into the hills, we should follow Him down from the hills, for this too is His command: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too.

In that, at least, we have Mary’s example to follow, for she went into the hill country of Judea to sing her Magnificat but descended to Nazareth to undertake her work – her work and our work - of bringing forth God’s son. 

Once upon a time...

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

****

Today's gospel (Luke 12: 54-59) is a reminder that even if Jesus is a mystery to us, we are no mystery to Him. When He asks why the people cannot read the signs of the times, it is not because He does not know the answer. And when He draws this scenario about having to go to court and being in danger of ending up in a debtors’ prison, He was not telling the people anything they did not know; rather He was telling them things they knew very well but did not like to think about. In this regard, these hypocrites in the gospel are once again ourselves.

How was it that people knew what the weather was going to be: whether it would be hot or whether it would rain? There was no weather service in the Roman Empire. They probably knew the future weather in the format of stories. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. In its aim, this saying is a weather forecast, but if we look at its structure or genre, it is a story. There are highs and there are lows. There is a hero. There is emotion; deep emotion. Above all, this story helps people make sense of their immediate surroundings, and it tells people what to do in the short term, assuming of course that they already have a long term plan. With this story of the coming weather, they travel into the future, and they can take action now to shape that future. Alongside all the models of humanity that anthropology has proposed, such as homo sapiens and homo faber (man the maker), we also find homo narrans - man the storyteller.

So, what then is Jesus getting at in the first part of this gospel if not simply that we are rather good at telling ourselves one kind of story (the one that plays to our self interest) but not so good at telling ourselves other kinds of story that are, shall we say, not so self-serving? We are good at telling ourselves the stories that tickle our ambitions and needs, or perhaps indulge our self hatreds; those stories that lie in embryonic form in our imaginations and grow and shrink like a wicked genie. We are not as good, perhaps, at telling ourselves the stories that we need to hear. 

In truth, audiences choose their stories. We characterise the cultures that we come across by the stories that they tell themselves. The people Jesus preached to liked stories about the weather, for many of them were farmers and this was an agricultural society. Today, the kind of stories that many of us read are plastered across the pages of the media in our letterboxes or more usually on our screens, and they are rarely of the edifying kind. In that sense, we might read The Times but do we have any more sense of the signs of the times that the original peasantry of ancient Israel?

The people in this gospel extract do not know the signs of the times because they decline to listen to the stories that could unfold for them the signs of the times. Like us, they tell themselves stories of anguish about the things that they desire or the things that they fear to lose, and all the while they ignore the stories that would interpret for them their true reality and the dangers in which they really stand.

For this is the essence of Jesus' complaint. The people are not anxious about eternity; they are more stirred by a story about a potential law case than they are by a story about the courtroom of the last judgement. But, as we noted above, people choose their stories. They would in fact listen to these stories about the last judgement if their hearts were in the right place; if in fact their hearts were seeking God. Of course they liked stories about their own piety; the stories that gave them reassurance about what fine fellows they were. Yet these stories did not cut very deep…

Unlike the story of Scripture which St Paul describes in the following way:

For the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

This is a story of high emotion too; of a hero, Jesus, who comes to our rescue, and of the drama that plays out for our salvation. This is the story that gives us the signs of the times, the story that tells of our peril, and of the destiny which cuts through every living and waking moment. This is the story in which, like Mary, we have the choice of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Lord. 

The only story left to tell, therefore, is what we are going to do about it right now.

A sign of contradiction

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 12:49-53) finds Jesus in one of His most contrary moods. This is the Jesus who turns over the table of the moneychangers. It is the Jesus who berates the Pharisees for their hypocrisies. It is the Jesus who simply refuses to open His mouth in the presence of Herod whom He calls at one point a ‘vixen’ (Luke 13:32); most English translations have it as ‘fox’ but the Greek indicates a female fox.  

Yet why does He do this? Is He not the bringer of peace? Does He not come to restore order, rather than to upset it? Does He not urge His disciples to unity and love? Where comes this taste for upsetting the apple cart or for flinging a bomb of controversy among the polite and well-respected denizens of Palestine?

Perhaps He does this for one reason only: that only in God are truth and unity mirror images of each other (along with goodness and beauty). In everything else, multiplicity is the order of the day, and in fallen humanity, multiplicity will also involve adversity and enmity: enmity towards each other and enmity towards God.

But evil has developed strategies to counter the bad press that comes from its divisions, and the chief of these is that all evil copies God. Some saints refer to the devil even as the ape of God. Moreover, evil can only be chosen under the appearance of good.

And this is why we must be cautious, not to say suspicious, of all attempts to call evil good and good evil; of all attempts to make us swallow a lie in the name of a truth. We are living in such an atmosphere right now in which assisted suicide is renamed ‘assisted dying’ and murder is rebranded ‘a woman’s right to choose’. Yet the relabelling can be even more deceptive still. Any call for unity which sacrifices truth smacks of a compromise from the devil’s own playbook. Sticking together even at the cost of truth and goodness is not a Christian instinct; it is a demonic strategy, for as I said, only in God are truth, goodness, and beauty the mirror images of unity.

Jesus’ solution for this dilemma is to be the sign of contradiction, as Simeon prophesied (Luke 2:34), to cast fire upon the earth. His fire is not the kind which destroys unless it is destroying sin. It produces not the kind of smoke which blinds unless to confound the minds of God’s enemies. Rather, it is a fire which warms, consoles and, yes, purifies: Our God is a consuming fire, as St Paul writes to the Hebrews. Its smoke does not choke us but cures and preserves the good in us, giving us the evangelical umami taste of the salt of the earth.

Yet the cost of this can be quite high: Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division, says Jesus. Why is this? It is because division already exists and arises from sin, from revolt against God. The world, shaped by original sin, is pulling away from God. Jesus’ salvific mission is to counteract this gravitational thrust towards hell, to bring humanity back within the orbit of heaven. And thus, from now on a household of five will be divided: three against two and two against three. It is not that Jesus wants the division; it is rather that He knows the cost of reconciliation. He knows that, in the end, unity must be governed by truth and follow the path of God’s order; not the deceitful order that our wayward hearts want to impose on our lives.

It is easy to call evil good; we do it every day when we sin. It is much more sinister to call good evil; God preserve us from such falls. But only God is goodness right through, as St Thomas More tells us in A Man for All Seasons. And this is why he will not bend to the will of Henry VIII over his fake marriage; this is why he goes to his death, even at the cost of seeming to be a traitor to his beloved king; even at the cost of hurting his precious family – parting from them not forever but only for a time. For God alone is goodness, truth, beauty, and unity bound together. He is our salvation and our fulfilment, the fulfilment of all our desire.

Herod the Great had been afraid that this new king of the Jews would take his tinsel crown; had he but known that Jesus wanted to give him a crown of eternal bliss, he might not have destroyed the flower of a generation of Bethlehem’s children. What evil we can do under the appearance of good! Let us have the courage to choose the peace that Jesus offers, the true peace of God, even when it is a sign of contradiction in this wayward world.

If I were a rich man (yabba, dabba, etc.)...

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

****

Today's gospel (Luke 12: 13-21) is one of those extracts in which the circumstances of daily life give rise to one of Jesus’ parables. Two brothers are in dispute over their family inheritance; two siblings set in rivalry against one another – and thus it has been since the time of Cain and Abel. But Jesus’ first response is not to underline their inherent hostility to one another but rather to warn against avarice of any kind:

for a man's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.

And, in this line, we learn why we should all pay attention to the parable that follows: not because this is a meditation on what we normally think of as avaricious behaviour, but rather because it reaches beyond it, to the kind of avarice that effects even those with modest incomes. On the surface, this is a parable about a rich man, but underneath this is a parable about us all.

Because we are all in search of what will make our lives secure. For the rich man in the parable, the pursuit of security consists in building bigger barns and storing up his goods. In his case, not only does he sin by seeking his security in the wrong place, but also by what he proposes to do next: take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time. Freely, he has received, for the harvest was good; but these goods do not flow freely through his hands to the benefit of others. Goodness wishes to share itself; evil is a cul de sac, and this man's priorities seem like a judgement on his soul, even though eating, drinking and having a good time are all necessary things in their place.

Yet, as I said, this is not just a parable about a rich man who is fixed on enjoying his bounty. It is a parable about the pursuit of security in all the wrong places. It is possible for us all to mistake our vocations and to forget that being rich in the sight of God is our true security. What is it that we are most afraid of? What is it that we perceive as a threat to ourselves? It may be physical suffering, poverty or illness. It could equally be mental suffering of some kind. In our own time and in our western cultures where we enjoy generally speaking an abundance of the things of this world, our mental suffering seems particularly acute. We live in a plague of anxiety, the world of work is wracked by stress, our family relations are poisoned by division; instead of hearing and pursuing our vocations, we hear and pursue unattainable prospects held up to us by the countless adverts we unwittingly drink in every day, or for some the professional demands of performance management. Even our children, exhausted by digitally induced dopamine insensitivity, grow bored and dissatisfied with the narrowness of it all. We have wanted to be rich in our own sight and the sight of others and have made ourselves paupers in the sight of God.

And even the most devout among us can be guilty of this avarice. We seek security when God calls us to intimacy. We seek safety even though salvation is a risky business. We want to treat grace like a currency that can be quantified and counted out, providing us with the warm reassurance of a rising bank balance. Perhaps we think that because Jesus paid the ransom for sin, our own part in the accounts must be traceable to some line in the ledger; it is but we will never know it until the day of judgement. For now, it is enough to know that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. God has not called us to calculate his mercies but to narrate them; to tell their story where we can. His love for us is a gift to be passed on; not a grab bag of merchandise to serve as our comfort blanket.  

For security cannot be reached directly. Like a landing place on the far side of a fast-flowing river, security will only come if we face the adventure of the currents, and cast ourselves upon the mercy of God. And then, to return to Jesus’ metaphor, we can be rich in the sight of God and by His own gifts: rich in love, rich in gratitude, rich in our joy and rich in readiness to say ‘yes’ to Him in every moment of our life.

Labourers and lambs

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

*****

Today's gospel (Luke 10:1-9) takes a step back to an earlier chapter in order to honour the feast of the evangelist Saint Luke. In this passage, Jesus commissions seventy-two disciples to go out to preach the gospel, to gather in the harvest, as He says. He gives them a series of seemingly complex instructions, less about what they will say, and more about their conduct and self-bearing. There are two injunctions about what must be said. The first is to tell the people that the kingdom of God is very near to you. The second - although this is left out of the extract in today’s Mass - concerns what to say to towns that do not receive them well: We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet, and leave it with you. Yet be sure of this: the kingdom of God is very near. And Jesus tells the seventy-two: on the great day it will be more bearable for Sodom than for that town. Sobering thoughts, and ones that are God’s mystery to unfold to us.

But, in all this passage, in addition to the injunctions about what to do, there are two observations of Jesus that tell the seventy-two who they are: they are labourers and they are lambs.

They are labourers because God usually works through secondary means. He does not dominate the world like a Greek god; and yet He might have chosen to do so. He might have chosen to be the divine superstar, a better-quality A-list panjandrum, drawing all and sundry from the four corners of the world. But this was not His way.

Instead, He made His disciples the members of His Mystical Body, and through that Mystical Body He bestrides the world, to serve His Father in all things, and - as He says here – to gather in the harvest. This is why the sins of the members of the Church are more grievous than the sins of others, because when they depart from the way, they sully the image of Christ in the world. The bishops are His chief labourers, assisted by their presbyterates, but every one of us is called to do our part in the evangelization of the world, even a world that has no time for the gospel message. In such labour, He is the measure of our success and the source of any fruitfulness. We cannot be anxious about what we might do, but only beg Him to make us docile instruments in his hands. We are unprofitable servants, even if we only do what we ought to.

But while we are labourers, Jesus also sends us out as lambs among wolves. This is perhaps one of His less consoling metaphors, and yet in another way, it is one that brings us closer to Him than that of labourer. How is it then that we are like lambs?

Firstly, we are like lambs because we are baptised in His death and resurrection. For he is the Lamb whose great, heavenly feast is celebrated in His parables; He is the lamb, likewise, who is sacrificed in order to save the world from the death of sin. And the extraordinary thing is that we are made like Him, made adopted sons and daughters of the Father through Him, conformed to the image of Christ, transformed by His grace. Of course we are lambs; we can be nothing else if we are true to Him.

Second, being lambs is an indication of the innocence to which He calls us. For our souls remain a battleground, and despite all we do to try to surrender to Him, we find ourselves rebels. It is not pious cant in the mouths of the saints when they say that they are sinners. In their total dependence on Him, they continue to heed His call to carry their cross, and to do penance, for the Bridegroom is no longer with them. This path of purgation is an indispensable element of the Christian life, for without it we cannot be the lambs He asks us to be.

Third, being a lamb means also not being a wolf, and yet we all have our own inner wolf. We may not be the rapacious, bloodthirsty predator that the word first evokes. But we are wolves in some dreadful ways, unconsciously exploitative, unthinkingly engaged in a search for influence or popularity, neglectful about cultivating what is around us, for wolves sow no fields but prosper by theft.

Unlike lambs, who prosper by enjoying what has been given to them by the hands of the Good Shepherd, whose choice of pastures is sometimes bewildering, but unquestionably drawn from His infinite wisdom. And it is there that He intends for us to be to receive His gifts and to share them with others. 

Come back to me Part 2

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even now, declares the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

    with fasting and weeping and mourning.

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

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

Come back to me

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 15-26) is a complex not to say confusing extract. Saint Luke does not identify those who were raising objections or criticisms about the exorcisms of Jesus. However, we can surmise that they were probably egged on by Jesus’ enemies. Yet, what comes next is hard to decipher. It seems to be, on the one hand, a kind of treatise in demonology that explains not only the inner logic of the kingdom of the devil, but also the power battles for souls that are waged by the fallen angels.

As always, we know that Jesus is teaching us here, leaving His lessons to be the food of slow reflection, rather than turning them into flash media campaigns that press everyone’s buttons without winning their hearts. One sign that there is more to it, is that Jesus verges in these exchanges almost on banter, reducing his critic’s arguments wittily to an absurdity. His argument about Satan's kingdom standing is a good debating point but, underneath it all, it is a poor argument, for we know that Satan's kingdom will not stand. Indeed, the fallen angels are in a very real sense fallen and divided; fallen from their friendship with God, fallen from their exalted status, fallen from the vocations. What can He mean, then, by arguing that kingdoms who are divided against themselves cannot stand?

One clue may lie in that apparently random remark that sits in the middle of this demonology: he who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters. Who is it who is not with Him or who does not gather with Him if not ourselves? Not that we are wholly in revolt, far from it, no more than the Sons of Thunder were in revolt; no more then brash Simon Peter was in revolt.

But, we are divided against ourselves. The further from God we are, the more scattered we are. We have our good intentions, but then we are all complicated. The pure light shines into us but refracts out of us in gaudy rainbow colours that fail to illuminate. We are the adopted children of God, and yet in our worse moments, as Shakespeare says,

Our natures do pursue,

Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,

A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.

This is not false abasement but a cause for humble joy for truth brings us insight. The demonology that Jesus sets out in this part of the gospel is of course about the fallen angels, but perhaps in another way, it is about ourselves. The devil in Latin is diabolus but this word comes from Greek and, according to some, it means to be thrown apart; in a sense, to be scattered. In truth, all our kingdoms are divided: the kingdom of Satan and the kingdoms of this world which are in fact ruled by the prince of this world, as we learn in the moment of the temptation of Christ. There is only one kingdom that is based on unity and it is the kingdom of God.

For God is one and sufficient unto Himself, yet He chose to share His goodness by creating the world and calling us into it. But, then the unity of God calls all things back to Himself, and by a special and extraordinary privilege, the call for the human race was to share in God's very happiness, in the inner life of love that belongs to the Holy Trinity. This is why we need forgiveness: for sin is brokenness, and a retreat from that original unity to which we were called. And this is also why, insofar as we do not gather with Christ, in all those parts of our inner life that do not strive towards unity with Him, we are scattering ourselves and our heritage to the four winds.

Mercy of mercies, however; over the din that is made by the forces that shatter our hearts, we hear those words related by the prophet Joel:

Even now, declares the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

    with fasting and weeping and mourning.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 25-37) relates the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. A lawyer questions Jesus, wanting to wrongfoot him, and Jesus, as always, side steps the trap, this time by shining the light of divine truth right into this lawyer’s eyes. And then comes the question: who is my neighbour? The fulfilment of the law that dictates that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself, depends entirely on a proper understanding of who one’s neighbour is. And so, the lawyer is anxious. He does not seek union with God but perfection. And in this way, his actions and attitudes already anticipate part of the parable to come.

The outline of the parable is, of course, well known. A man is waylaid by brigands on his way to Jericho, a priest and a levite pass him by and do not help him, and it is only because of the actions of a Samaritan - a member of a sect in schism from the main body of Judaism - that this poor man is helped. So many Saints and Doctors of the Church have commented on this passage. The man travelling to Jericho is often seen as a symbol of fallen humanity, attacked by the violence of the devil and left for dead. The priest and the levite symbolise the Law and the Prophets that cannot deliver the man from his misfortune. And the Samaritan is none other than Jesus, the one who was rejected, who becomes the source of the man's salvation, and pays the price of his care and rehabilitation.

There are always spiritual lights to be found in these parables, however. Can we imagine, for example, that the priest and the levite are so entirely indifferent to the fate of the man who has been attacked? Personally, I doubt it. So then, the question arises as to why they took no action to look after him? What afflicts them to prevent then caring for him in his grievous need? And what has this to do with us who have probably never crossed the path of a Jewish priest or levite?

We might see in these two figures two different kinds of spiritual disease that corrupt the exercise of love of neighbour. In the case of the priest, for example, we might see the kind of service or ministry which has become so official that all fervour has drained out of it. The priest is busy about his business. He has places to go and people to see. He has meetings to attend, forms to fill in, reports to write, and appointments that cannot be missed. And this is how ministry of any kind, not just the ministry of a priest, can turn from an exercise in the unction of the Holy Spirit into a fossilised object that serves nobody's benefit but its own. This is the kind of ministry which sees people as clients, rather then as suppliants whose chief need is mercy. It no longer seeks to battle with sin but only with disorganisation. It wishes to deal with symptoms and not with causes. It prefers to place cushions beneath the elbows of sinners, rather than perform the uncomfortable service of challenging their complacency. This is a ministry that seeks control of its beneficiaries, rather than looking for Christ in their eyes. It is a ministry of jargon, propped up by cliché, that probably feels like a burden but a burden that cannot be put down. What is missing in all this is the inner dynamic, the life at the roots, the energy that makes the Samaritan stop in his tracks and adjust himself to the needs of the person who lies by the side of the road, abandoning the schedules and appointments he has fixed in his diary, to tend the man’s wounds that suppurate with the poison of sin. When officiousness has replaced care, charity has already fled.

Those of us who have no particular ministry may feel such lessons do not apply to us. But not so fast: for here comes the levite. The priest suffered from one kind of disease, but at least his focus was still on things around him, even if his ministry was supposed to make him care for people rather than things. The levite, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. The levite does not want to touch the man, not because he has other things to do, but probably because he perceives that in touching the man, he may become ritually unclean. His focus is not on organisation, planning, appointments, official meetings and all the paraphernalia of a busy priestly ministry. Rather, it is fixed on just how well he is doing himself. After all, he is trying to be as perfect as his Heavenly Father. He has fallen in love, not with God Himself but with the idea of loving God, or perhaps with the idea that proof of his loving God might be found in the approval that other people show for his patent devotion, his exactitude in the performance of his religious duties, for by their fruits you will know them. It is not so much that he does not love his neighbour; he will know he loves his neighbour when others observe him loving his neighbour, just not here on this lonely road where his neighbour appears so frightening and hideous. He remembers ultimately that the law commands him to love his neighbour as himself, and he loves himself so very much…

Between the minister who is lost in officialdom and the devotee who is lost to a project of self perfection, it is little surprise if wounds go unhealed, sins go unforgiven, broken hearts lie unmended, and wandering sheep remain lost. It is little wonder that the priest and levite both are dying from a poison they have little hope of understanding or seeking the remedy to.

And yet in the midst of it all, the answer to the riddle of the love of neighbour is lived out in the actions of a Samaritan who attends wholly to the victim in front of him, without ever shifting his attention away from the source of all love. The secret is compassion the origin of which word is to suffer with. We must bear each other's burdens; for that is how we fulfil this law of love.

Away, then, with officialdom and away with cold perfection. Let us allow the love of God to make us docile tools in the hands of the Potter himself.