Who are you and who am I?

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog 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.

Three impossible things before breakfast.

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 17:1-6) gives us a taste of Jesus at His most demanding: in this case, He apparently wants us to achieve three impossible things before breakfast.

Obstacles are sure to come, He says, but alas for the one who provides them. But how am I, a sinner, to avoid being an obstacle – a scandal – if even the just man falls seven times a day? And, how, thereby, am I to avoid being the one cast into the sea with the dubious, sartorial distinction of a millstone for a necktie?

Next, Jesus also commands, if your brother wrongs you seven times a day and seven times comes back to you to say, “I am sorry,” you must forgive him. But Lord, we might say, surely the brother or sister who says sorry so often has rendered the word as meaningless as it is in the mouths of polite English gentlemen. To forgive one offence seems noble; to forgive liberally seems to make forgiveness cheap.

And lastly – as if these commands were not already impossible – the Lord gives us an outlandish measure against which to assess our Christian belief: Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you. Well, if mulberry trees are not common in our own country, it is certainly not because of the faith of the people! If we have ever taken pride in the bellowing chorus of Faith of our Fathers, we might reflect in our more sober moments on the fact that the local trees are probably quite safe in our presence, God helps us.

Jesus never heard of SMART targets - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely – but then His targets are so much more than any we can conceive of. Indeed, this is our challenge here: not to assume we can achieve in any concrete sense the demands that He places on us, but rather to confess our insufficiency before the task of redemption ahead and our utter dependence on Him.

Will obstacles – scandals - come because of our actions? God help us, there is every chance that they will. Which should be a reminder to us that our renewal in grace depends on our returning again and again for the Lord’s forgiveness. For our weaknesses before the calls of the Christian life are legion, but so too are the gestures and mercies of the Lord of grace who comes to our aid and makes haste to help us. The first impossible task, therefore, is to refuse to believe we can stand except by God’s power: if any man think he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says St Paul to the Corinthians, and perhaps it is also to cover our unsteady tracks across the sands of time with a torrent of prayer poured out for those in whose lives we did not play the role assigned to us by Divine Providence. Moreover, there is this further consolation that if we have fitted the yolk of prayer for others onto our shoulders, perhaps there will be no room for that millstone that is otherwise destined for us.

And, if God can be our sufficiency in that regard, He is also our sufficiency with regard to our constant need to forgive. To always forgive is not to be weak or cheap; rather, it is to choose the peace of God before what Thomas Hobbes called the war of all against all. How easy it is to elect persecution and conflict, to choose to protect our sense of self by damaging that of others. So many of the ancient religions of the world purged their social conflict through persecuting the innocent, and here is Jesus, the victim of sin, who chooses not to retaliate; who chooses to say peace be with you, even to those who have connived in His death. To tell us to forgive our brothers and sisters seventy times seven is no less a task than to tell us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. And here again, our sufficiency comes not from our own strength, but from His grace that pours out upon our hearts the impulse of His love and the peace that it engenders.

In this light, we can also lastly hope that our faith might not remain smaller than the mustard seed. The mulberry trees might remain safe in our presence, but who can plant trees in the sea if not the One who walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee? Like our torrent of prayer for those for whom we have been obstacles, here we may offer another kind of prayer: 

Lord, increase my faith or else, Lord I believe, help my unbelief; please help that part of my scandal-causing, unforgiving soul that still says “no” to you, just help it to dab its finger in your precious blood and write Credo – I believe – in the sand of my life.   

We cannot do three impossible things before breakfast; we cannot even do one. But we can do all things in Him who strengthens us: whose grace prevents us, and whose mercy refreshes our taste for peace. And, then, in the light of the Morning Star of our Mother, we can turn our meagre faith heavenwards once more.   

They know not what they do

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

Today’s gospel (Luke 16: 1-8) is a strange one involving the parable of a dishonest man who is sacked for being wasteful with his master’s possessions. He ends up being praised for the dishonest albeit clever way in which, before he leaves his job, he buys friends by reducing their debts to the master. It must be one of the oddest parables Jesus ever told. As the scholastics used to say, every comparison limps except in the point of comparison, and so we must look here closely not at the dishonesty or wastefulness but at the reason given for the master’s praise of his servant:

The master praised the dishonest steward for his astuteness. For the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light.

Possibly, it should not surprise us that the children of this world are astute. The darkness which St John tells us did not understand the light is, nevertheless, characterised often by its cunning.  But, is it not a surprise that the children of light fail to be astute, to be insightful? What is going on here?

After all, the children of light are supposed to be blessed with particular gifts such as wisdom, knowledge, and understanding – all charisms that are concerned in one way or another with intellectual insights. How is it that they can, therefore, lack astuteness? And, ultimately, what does this tell us about them?

In one way, perhaps this lack of astuteness flatters the children of light. If they lack practice in planning and plotting to get what they want, that is possibly because they are not in the habit of planning and plotting to get what they want. It is not that they lack the brains to do so, but rather that they are consciously committed – or at least they try to be – to a more benign agenda. Evil falls back only on its own powers, or else preys on the weakness of others. Good turns to God for aid. In a sense, the children of light are not astute because they do not – or, perhaps we should say, they ought not - aspire to the falsehoods of power and influence. Our help is in the name of the Lord who inspires us to the dependence of children in His regard. The children of light are not astute in the same way that children are not astute. They live by trust, not by treason. When they are at their best, their language is surrender, not selfishness – or it ought to be.

Yet, taken in another way, this lack of astuteness might be far from being a credit to the children of light. As we noted on Monday, our souls are a battleground for two competing loves, and even when our conscious minds are committed to the path of the children of light who love God, we still battle against the flesh, the world and the devil who only love themselves. In other words, even when we have received that kiss of peace that comes to us in the Father’s love, we still struggle against the child in us who remains the child of this world.

Now, this child in us is astute, for this child – our worse selves – not only has the astuteness of the children of this world but can dress up that cleverness in the robes of righteousness. And, if we do not know ourselves, if we are naïve enough to believe in our own justice - or not so much to believe in it as to fail to remember that our justice continues to be besieged even by the lingering effects of original sin – then, we are on the path of the Pharisees who were, as the saying goes, as pure as angels and as proud as devils. Do we need the astuteness of the children of this world, therefore? Only insofar as it may help us spot its traces in our own motives, our own poorly regulated unconscious and dissonant needs whose feet trample everywhere beneath the surface of our consciences.

We are, as we noted before, and remain a battleground.

 Video proboque meliora

Deteriora sequor.

I see and approve the better things / But the worse things I follow. Even the pagan poet Ovid knew of this war in us. How is it that the children of light can so easily lose sight of it? As St Paul tells the Romans:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Are we then destined to be overcome both by our lack of astuteness as children of light and by our sinful weakness? Maybe we would be, were it not for the ingeniousness of love. For love, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very essence and existence of our God, will find a way to help us seek the face of the Lord and yearn for it, even in the midst of our own self-betrayals. We are back again at those lines from St Augustine:

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.

The folly of God is greater than the wisdom or astuteness of this world, says St Paul to the Corinthians. If we wish to remain children of light, we can only do so by living in the love of God in whose wisdom all the astuteness of this world comes to nothing. In this light, even the traces of worldly astuteness that remain in us can serve to help keep our feet on the ground and our hearts in heaven where they ought to be. For power belongs, in the end, not to astuteness but to love.

Seeking the face of God

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.