On being strange

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 25-30) offers us a series of Jesus’ teachings which are superficially easy to understand but beneath which lie chasms of gigantic, challenging truths. Jesus praises the Father for revealing His teachings to little children, while hiding them from those who believe they are the grown-ups. Jesus underlines His special relationship with the Father, and the fact that no one can know the Father except by His grace. Finally, He encourages us to shoulder His burdens which are easy and light.

Allow me, dear reader, to indulge a few ironies in the following reflection. Sometimes we have to confront our complacency to get at the kernel of the Gospel's message.

Today's extract may seem to some so simple, so easily ingested, so sweet and soothing? We hear in this passage the kinds of “Jesus sayings” that could be repeated on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, for they seem to validate the kind of humble-crumble religion that does not threaten to overwhelm, that charms us a little with mystical allusions. If we take just these very lines, we could easily imagine they had been polished for Jesus by a clever PR guru. One can easily imagine the sworn enemies of truth happy to turn most of this extract into a series of lapel badges with smiley faces, to be given out free of charge to young people at music festivals, once the drugs have worn off and the morning-after pills have been distributed of course. The world loves it when the Gospel is inoffensive. 

But all of these flights of ironic fancy would only then disguise the inner steel of this eleventh chapter of Matthew which begins with John the Baptist sending his own disciples to Jesus to ask whether He is really the Messiah - John the Baptist, a man who finds himself in prison for being, what shall we call it…publicly judgemental about the tetrarch of Galilee and his personal life? One can do all kinds of wicked things in this wicked world and still have the world’s approval - from bankrolling orgies to dining with your enemies - but if you insist, like John the Baptist, on taking the law of God on marriage and sex seriously, then prepare yourself for tribulation. I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children... little children like John, His cousin. By the way, John the Baptist knew full well who Jesus was; he sent his disciples to Jesus only because they were too devoted to himself, and he wanted them to see the reality of the Messiah.

And, so, this disarmingly simple, perhaps we could say this deceptively simple, gospel continues. For on the one hand,

No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,

but on the other, this gift of the Son does not come without responsibility on the part of the listener. Just before this gently seductive passage, Jesus denounced the towns where His miracles had been performed. God forgive them, they had seen His works but found Him wanting. In other words, the Son offered to reveal the Father to these towns, and yet they closed their minds against Him. When He cures the lame, these towns behave as if He had given them bread and circuses and can't get enough of Him. The Beatitudes of the World begin with "Blessed are the sweet talkers for they are the children of the serpent in the garden". That is why when Jesus calls them to repent and to go and sin no more, He finds many of them ... indifferent – as if the problem lies with Him, not them.

I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgement than for you,

says the gentle Jesus, at least before the PR department and the diplomatic service get hold of the message.

Jesus, they might ask Him, are you trying to drive people away? 

But Jesus, as sweet as He is, is the Truth, and He has no time for their lies.

No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him, Jesus replies.

And then comes Jesus’ final coup de grace - my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This time the objections of the PR department would probably relate to the terms of the trade description act. How can Jesus say His burden is light while also saying take up my cross and follow me? This is very mixed signalling. Jesus needs to simplify His message, doesn’t He? To take a few lessons in homiletics perhaps? Or rather, instead of saying both these things, Jesus would be much better off just preaching about the easy and the light bit, wouldn’t He? How can we take Him out in public if He insists on talking like He has an appointment with sacrifice and suffering? 

The words today of the Entrance Antiphon in the Old Rite will serve us well here: For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of affliction, to give you an end and patience.

How can we think again upon His sufferings, not as an unbearable burden, but as His peace and His reconciliation? As the words of one whose yolk is sweet and whose burden is light?

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Two scenes conclude this oddly ironic reflection on the gospel. The first is from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

For our struggle, says the Apostle to the Gentiles who ultimately chopped his head off, is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

And the second is from St Catherine of Sienna, one of the little children alluded to in today’s gospel. Now, she was an extremist. Be who God wants you to be and you will set the world on fire, she says. 

But just remember the following. What St Catherine does not say here is that when you set the world on fire, you will be called a pyromaniac, you will be imprisoned for arson, and your bad behaviour will be used as an example of hate-filled irresponsibility by the media who like to educate us all on the kinds of behaviour that are expected from responsible citizens. 

You will know the truth and the truth will make you... strange, says American novelist Flannery O'Connor. Then will we be in good company, for the Sacred Heart, Saviour of this world, is Himself so very often a stranger in a strange land. 

But that is where He and we are meant to be to do the will of the Father.

From the archives: of salt and light

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

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Today's gospel (Matthew 5: 13-16) sees Jesus deliver a teaching that is all about the self-awareness of the disciple. Jesus addresses His disciples with two metaphors: you are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world. The stakes of self-awareness enter into the equation when He invites the disciples to reflect on whether they are faithful to these challenges of discipleship: let your light shine before others. Self-awareness and an awareness of others that is oriented towards their good, not one’s own.

In both cases - salt and light - it is a matter of balance. On the one hand the salt must not be tasteless. Salt induces the sense of taste precisely by stimulating the sensitivity of taste buds. If food is not excessively salted, what we taste is the food that is enhanced, not the salt. In the case of the disciples, what is interesting is that Jesus calls them the salt of the earth. God made the earth and everything in it: every joyous thing - from the scent of a delicate flower to the pleasures of marital union - is His gift. But sin alienates as from every good thing, and it is only within the framework of our relationship with Almighty God that we can rediscover the truth of things, even of ourselves. In this sense, discipleship must itself be a journey of incarnation in which divine grace reshapes the fabric of the world and the fabric of our lives in it according to His image. When the Holy Spirit moves the Gift of Knowledge in us, we read deeply into things of the earth the imprint of the finger of God. Beyond the physical appearances lie the mysteries of the love that conceived and created everything around us. Perhaps, if we are faithful, others too will discern that mystery through what they see in us: in that perspective, we can be the salt that awakens them to the mystery just waiting for them.

But I said above that this is a matter of balance, and perhaps this is better seen in the second metaphor of the gospel: you are the light of the world. On Ash Wednesday, we will hear Jesus tell us to hide ourselves away when we pray and do penance. In today’s gospel, we hear Him command the opposite: let our light shine before men. In other words, just as salt must be balanced, so too must light. We must not hide away unnecessarily; even Jesus chose his moments to speak but sometimes fled the crowds and would not disclose His intentions. Not to hide our light is a matter of just being who we are. While this commands integrity, it also requires discretion. Jesus’ command is to be the light of the world, but there is a difference between being the light of the world and trying to shine that light directly into someone’s eyes! This differs according to context and individual. Some people are ready to look for the light; yet others are so accustomed to darkness that a rude illumination is as likely - if not more likely - to provoke them to screw their eyes up tight, rather than opening them.

While being the salt of the earth requires the Gift of Knowledge, being the light of the world requires the movements of the Gift of Counsel: the gift of knowing when and how to intervene, of when to echo the words of Jesus and when to emulate His silence. The divine gifts we cannot use of our own accord. All we can do is beg the Holy Spirit to move them in us; all we can do is try to remove every obstacle in us to their movement, readying ourselves to be docile instrument in the hands of the Master. Even then, only He can truly prepare us for that service which we are called to give. We must beg from him even our beggar’s voice, as Fabrice Hadjadj says.

Then, both we and those for whom we aspire to be both salt and light may be able one day to give praise together to our Father in heaven.   

 

Going after strange gods

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 28-34) marks a contrast with the gospel of Tuesday. Then, Jesus was approached by some of the more dishonest scribes, looking to ensnare Him in questions. Today, we have one of the honest ones, sincerely wondering and pondering, thinking about God, questioning himself, wanting to discern honestly who Jesus was, and trying to hear God’s call in his daily life. Jesus meets him, responds to his question, and we hear in the scribe’s quiet reaction – well spoken, Master, what you have said is true – a sign that Jesus’ words hit home, went to the man’s heart, and spoke to his concerns not only about the Scriptures but, at least implicitly, about Him.

What did he want to know anyway? In essence, he wanted to know the most important commandment. Why? Because what we put first defines who we are and tells others who we are. This question could hardly have been a point of dispute among the scribes, but it was surely the right question to discern who Jesus was, or rather where He was from. For who but somebody on God’s side would put the love of God above all other things? My kingdom is not of this world. Jesus is not in search of Himself or in search of what He can accumulate for Himself, as we too often are. His heart is turned to the Father, rapt in an inner prayer of contemplation and love, even as He goes about His daily business. And the mood music of this inner attention is captured precisely by those words:

Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. […] and you must love your neighbour as yourself.

Note here also the first clause that lays emphasis on God’s identity first:  the Lord our God is the one Lord. Some might say that this was emphasised because polytheism was the cultural context in which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses after the Jews had been living for so long with their Egyptian polytheist slave owners.

Yet there is something more here. Human nature in its sinfulness is inclined more or less towards dislodging God from His central place in our hearts and to squeezing in something else in His place, often ourselves, sometimes other things insofar as they serve our purposes. We do not see or know ourselves as idolators, but that is because we do not know ourselves well enough, or see how we honour our wayward needs, pamper our desires, sacrifice important things on the bonfire of our own vanities, or place ourselves unconsciously ahead of God and neighbour. Yet our call is not to be perfect in our own eyes, but to give our all to God so He can make us what He intends us to be. The Lord our God is the one Lord and so our lives must in some senses be a hunt for the idols that we consciously or unconsciously try to sneak into their honoured places in our interior castles.

These idols are obvious when they are central to some sin or other: greed or anger, laziness, or hostility. Yet they can lurk or hide away also in hidden corners where the light shines less: our unexamined needs, our wayward tendencies which we turn a blind eye to, those indulgences that provoke just a minor itch without ever really coming to the surface of our minds, but which corrode our efforts all the same.

Since loving God seems such a lovely and pleasant end to which to be called, you would think that we would run towards it without a trace of hesitation. And yet here we are, years after we have known our calling, still lingering in the doldrums of self-obsession instead of charging across the ocean of God’s goodness, sails filled with the winds of His love.

Lord make me know your ways, the ways to your heart, the ways to serve my neighbour, and the ways to break free of the slavery that my own wayward heart still hankers for.

The Lord our God is the one Lord: we must have no strange gods before him, and least of all, ourselves.

  

Two swords

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 13-17) contains two stories in one: the story of how Jesus’ enemies tried once more to trap him in His words and failed – failed calamitously and humiliatingly. Their attempt to ensnare him, inspired no doubt by the devil himself, backfired spectacularly as Jesus delivered one of His most memorable teachings.

And there is the second story: that we should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. What a teaching to be echoed down the history of the Church, from the first days of the Christians in Roman-occupied Palestine to the days of the Roman empire, from the initiation of Christendom under Constantine to the development of the doctrine concerning the power of the two swords by Pope St Gelasius, and throughout all the subsequent relations between Church and State down to our present day, where the State often continues to bully the Church when it can, and when corrupt churchmen sometimes mistake their duty to evangelise with worldly entanglements in the powers of this world.

Sometimes Christians mistake this doctrine as a contempt for worldly power, but that is not so. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s: Caesar does have a proper sphere of power, and we honour God in honouring that power, for God is the source of all authority, as St Paul teaches.

And yet, that power has its limits in two ways. First, it does not extend to all the resources of human fulfilment. In the end, the powers of this world do not render us whole, even if good government and stable societies can be hugely valuable in bringing about our happiness. It is easy to scorn our corrupt and calamitous western powers, but I thank God very often that I do not live in a tin-pot dictatorship, a communist enclave, or some unruly state where one is never sure whether the water will run in the morning. I don’t mind tax in principle, even if I believe I am overtaxed! Yet, my point here is a spiritual one. Politics and even the goods of society do not complete us; even the wonders of a harmonious community do not define us. Deep down, we are called to something greater and more sublime for we have here no abiding city. Do we think about what that means to us as often as we should? Or do we find ourselves troubled by the instability of this troubled world? Too many of us break our hearts over outcomes we should have expected: the eternal disappointments of the all too human powers that rule us.

Yet the second way that the power of Caesar has its limits lies in the boundaries that it ought to respect and often does not. Justice must be done insofar as it can be. Caesar in this sense must do two things: render to men the things that are men’s, and also render to God the things that are God’s. We have come to think of the religious domain as something totally estranged from the spiritual. And yet, what does it mean for England to be Our Lady’s Dowry if not some kind of recognition, captured beautifully in the famous Wilton Diptych, that a State can recognise the legitimate claims of Christ; that a State can undo the ignorance and scepticism of Pontius Pilate, and when Christ declares Himself to be the truth, reply not What is truth? but rather, To whom else would we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life. This is the foundation on which St Thomas More's final words will rest: I die the king's good servant but God's first. Why? Precisely because St Thomas heard this teaching; it is not a doctrine somehow removed from our spiritual lives but it runs right through the war of powers that can tear through our flesh and our spirits - the war of the individual with the collective. We must seek peace with all, but in the end, God's cause comes first, even if it makes us criminals... In that too, we must be ready to follow the Lord who died a criminal, an outlaw, a rebel against legitimate authority. 

Political theology is not some special brand of the sacred sciences for people who like the broadsheet newspapers. It is how Christians have tried to see the reality and consequences of the gospel in the public square, not locking up the seeds of the good news in some private, comfortable space where we are all cosy members of a close-knit club, but taking it into the open so that it can help reshape laws such as those that concern respect for life or economic justice. In this sense, the domains of Caesar and of God overlap each other not as contrary powers but as elements that unite two crucial dimensions of our souls. For man is a social being, and the privatisation of religion only lays a path towards its increasing irrelevance.

When we render to God the things that are God’s and when Caesar does likewise, we are all a step closer to that kingdom to which He calls us.

Not by eastern windows only

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 26: 36-42) is yet another passage which shows us, like the gospel on Tuesday, the relationship between the Son and the Father. Jesus has arrived at the garden of Gethsemane, and there goes aside to pray with Peter, James, and John. Watch, He tells them, before hurling Himself into a prayer which, at least in its first part, we have all echoed in our own lives: Father, please do not let this happen. Nevertheless, thy will be done. He then reproaches his disciples for falling asleep before returning once more to the same prayer and arriving again at the same conclusion: if this cannot pass, thy will be done.

We saw in our last reflection the priestly prayer of Jesus, that the love of the Father for the Son should be in us. Yet it would be wrong to assume that even His most magnificent of prayers exhausted His priestly ministry. St Paul tells us that every high priest is appointed among men in the things that appertain to God, but it is not just petition that priests must concern themselves with; it is also sacrifice.

What is that mechanism of the sacrifice in the life of the priest, or indeed in the lives of any of us? It is, as it were, a reversal of the original disobedience that our first parents worked on behalf of us all. Their sin of disobedience was actually a sin of theft first and foremost, or an attempted theft of the honour and reverence due to God, their Creator. In that moment, man tried to hold the world without holding on to God, tried to wrestle and twist the gift of Creation out of His hands, and make it subservient to his own will. And so now, it is fitting that our lives must involve some kind of sacrificial giving back to God of something that we prize and hold dear but which we surrender to Him. But here’s the problem: until the coming of Christ, there was no sacrifice we could offer that could mend the damage of the original theft.

Having severed himself from God, man was not empowered but disempowered, not expanded but crushed, not liberated but enslaved. Thinking he was choosing freedom, he chose instead enthralment to himself and to all the unruly forces of hell that were then unleashed within him. Where once God’s beauty and order had dwelled, now demonic ugliness and disorder left him weak, such that even when the spirit was willing, the flesh remained feeble. What was needed at that point was not only a Saviour who could ask for what man was no longer entitled to, who could repair what no human could fix, but also a teacher and an example who could enter into the inner darkness and chaos in the human soul to make the crooked straight and retrain the devastated vineyard, to graft the branches torn from their stock, and lift up the flowers crushed by the heavy tread of sin. If we do not recognise these signs in us, we do not yet know ourselves. Behold Jesus now in the darkness of Gethsemane come not only to show us Truth but to be the Way and the Life of all us broken ones.

And now we can understand better what it means for the love of the Father for the Son actually to dwell in us: it means now a counter rebellion, an uprising against the uprising, a pushing back of the revolution, not by our power alone but by His power in us, He who Is acting in we who are not; indeed, by His power with which we cooperate to such an extent that St Paul will say: I live; now not I but Christ lives in me. Gethsemane in this light takes us back to the original place of our desertion and also to the deepest recess of our soul where everything is despair, where we can only watch ourselves sliding towards the abyss, and it says in that darkness the words that need to be spoken again: Father, let your will be done in me.

How then can the love of the Father for the Son dwell in us? By Jesus’ prayer? By all means. But most especially when we allow Him to come and say that prayer in us; to say His yes and His thank you, like His Mother Mary, to the Father of all, when we allow that grace of Her Annunciation to catch by anticipation a glimmer of the fire lit in Gethsemane where Jesus begins to consummate in sacrifice – starting with the sacrifice of His will – the very meaning of His prayer of restauration: that the love of the Father for the Son may be in the disciples.

And then His victory, which is yet to be fulfilled, is laid in seed, anchored on the rock which is Christ, and dug about with a promise of organic fruitfulness in spite of the lifeless, hopeless soil that surrounds it. And the conviction that things are about to change and the dawn about to break are brought home to us once more:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

     The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

     And as things have been they remain.

 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

     And, but for you, possess the field.

 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

 

And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.

  

Only love abides again

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

Today’s gospel (John 17: 20-26) repeats the gospel of last Thursday when the reflection observed that its subject matter could not be exhausted, and here we are again, bowing our heads necessarily before the enormity of the mystery of God. That the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Human beings are sensitive to repetition but our relationship to it is complex. The expression “vain repetition” comes from the gospel when Jesus condemns the prayers of the pagans as babbling. I call that interreligious realism on our Lord’s part. But my point is that repetition is not in itself vain. How many times did Jesus Himself need to repeat things to his apostles? This was not vain repetition but pedagogical realism: repetition is the mother of learning.

And yet repetition is also something else as well: it is in some ways the tick of the inner clock of a living cosmos. The earth repeats its ritual circling of the sun, like an ancient worshipper whirling around its deity. The sun itself makes a repeated appearance over the horizon every morning or, to be more precise, the earth again spins us around on an axis that revolves like the central hub of a roundabout. Chesterton celebrates this repetition as a proof of the excess of divine joy. Like a child who demands to be pushed on a swing again and again, or to be hurled up in the air in the arms of its father, so the joy of God overflows into His creation, saying again and again to the sun, “Do it again.” And here again, we might detect an echo of this gospel: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

We see this repetition in the liturgy. In the rite of Holy Mass, the priest makes one solemn sign of the cross over the gifts, but in the old rite, the priest makes repeated signs of the cross throughout the Offertory and Eucharistic prayer, over host, over chalice, and then, over them both, finally tracing the sign of the cross with the host over the top of the chalice, festooning as it were the sacrificial oblata with the mystical joy that unites the Eucharistic species to the bloody offering of Calvary. We still see some of these rituals in the Eastern liturgies: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Meaningful repetition is then my point, for how can even begin to approach a limitless mystery within the confines of narrow time, narrow space, and narrow human minds? The repetitions, the daily exercises prepare our wills and hearts to follow, and by God’s blessing, we hope He will move His gifts within us, in us the Pentecost children, to speak a prayer back to the Father with unutterable groanings like St Paul: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

The road goes ever on and on, down from the dawn where it began – as Tolkien wrote, never realising that some of his words of wisdom would one day find their way into a papal encyclical, as they did yesterday. But we make our way along a road likewise by repetition, the repetition of placing one foot in front of another, first left, then right, capturing the joy of the traveller, the joy perhaps of a shepherd heading to Bethlehem or a tardy disciple chasing the dust stirred up by the apostolic road trip, stepping always – we hope – towards that mystery that calls us home continually so that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Centuries ago, Christianity in the west made its first misstep when religion came to be seen less as a pilgrimage and more as a fine art. Thus spoke Christopher Dawson in his essay Progress and Religion. It is not fine novelty that we need, or pretentions to discovering something new that nobody else has hitherto realised; we do not need to multiply new beginnings. Rather, we need to pursue with dogged fidelity the same reality again and again, going deeper every time, the repetition being the honour human weakness pays to the imitation of the inimitable one: Jesus, in whose image we are remade by grace that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

And so, finally comes the point, as Jesus explains in this passage again, as He had explained it before:

I desire, the Lord says, that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Joy awaits those whom He takes with Him. And He takes with Him those who surrender to Him their all, their yes and their thanks, like Mary His Mother. And He in return does not promise to make us happy in this life, but plants in the soil of our every pain the seeds of the unending joy of His Father: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us also.

 

 

Only love abides

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

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Today’s gospel (John 17: 20-26) continues the priestly prayer of Jesus that we have been listening to throughout the week. Again, we hear its simple but sublime themes rehearsed: the relationship of the Son to the Father, their unity and mutual indwelling so to speak, their life in eternity before the foundation of Creation, the revelation that Jesus is to those to whom the Father sent Him. Increasingly, in this section we see also identified the fruits of the outpouring of the life of the Blessed Trinity on those whom the Father has given to the Son, and now not only their relationship to God, but their relationship with each other because of that God-relationship: that they may be one even as we are one. Yet, being one is only one of the four qualities of being, which is why there can be no unity without truth, no unity without goodness, and no unity that does not let break forth its rays of beauty. And none of those qualities could be what they are without their grounding in the unending love of God, which is why, as this passage concludes, Jesus prays:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

As in our reflections earlier this week, there are some passages of Scripture that simply require the bowing of our heads and the stilling of our minds. Their enormity is beyond us in our usually busy and accelerated heads. The truths of this passage do not come to us in slow motion; rather they move at the pace of eternal life itself, and that requires something of us summed up in that famous quip:

Don’t just do something, stand there!

Stand and listen, stand and contemplate, stand and receive. The centre of our very being is not where we sought it, not in our inner harmony, nor in our restless perfectionism, not in our successes, and certainly not in our acquisition of pious moods and behaviours that we believe we have paid a stipend for.  The centre of our being is in Him and in Their life.

The centre of our lives is ultimately in the realisation of Jesus’ prayer in us:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

We are not the end point and could never have been. We are children born into an existing ocean of love, only, for us collectively, that ocean is not bounded by human parents but by the unity of the three Divine Persons whose shared life has broken forth in Creation and our Redemption.

 That the Father’s love may be in us: that is no meditation for one morning’s reflection. It is a mystery that cannot be contained by any humanly imagined bounds. And yet its logic is a golden thread that we must pursue. What would our lives look like if lived by that love? If we allow Jesus’ prayer to be realised in us, how differently would we live?

We might also ask: what in our lives is truly compatible with that love? Have we been faithful to it? Have we sought to trade in currencies that have no part in that love? Have we preferred some other love to His?

We cannot keep ourselves safe in that regard; our fidelity to love must also come from Him. In order to find Him who is All, we must realise that we are as nothing. I write rhetorically of course; we are never nothing. But we are the broken ones who must be mended in the love of the Father who awaits us, ready to place the ring on our finger and hold a feast when we receive again His love.

What can our poor prayers – so broken like ourselves – do for if not echo, therefore, constantly the very petition Jesus has made known to us. Nothing else will matter in eternity: That the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in each and every one of us. Now and forever. Amen.

 

In our end is our beginning

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

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Today’s gospel (John 17: 1-11) is one of the most mysterious, one of the most dazzling, passages in all of the New Testament. In it, we enter into the Sacred Heart, as into some vast cathedral where the soaring vaults carry both the thunder of the organ and the whisper of many prayers. It is hard to condense its content, as we usual do at the start of every reflection. Suffice it to say that we see two things principally: on the one hand, the relationship of the Son to the Father, and on the other, the care of both of them for those they intend to rescue from sin. First, a crucial moment has come in the Incarnation when the Son, who has laid down His glory to become man, will be both humiliated by men and glorified by His Father who is in heaven. Second, we hear then the prayer of Christ interceding for the apostles, his first disciples, and the very stem cell members as it were of His Mystical Body whom He has rescued from the world. Every prayer of the Church since that moment has been so to speak a chorus of, or a participation in, that prayer that Christ offers in that moment to the Father. How still the room must have been as these unforgettable words fell upon their ears! Nothing so sublime and yet nothing so strange and unheard of had yet been uttered in the history of the world as these lines!

The foundation of everything in our religion is found in this passage. First, in the relationship of the Father and the Son between whom of course is found the Holy Spirit, their mutual and eternal love, we find the origin of that source from which, first, Creation and then, later, Salvation, gushes forth. In our end is our beginning, and since God is the origin of all, God could have done nothing greater for us than to have offered us a share in His eternal and communal happiness. It is no wonder that St John is the evangelist that is prefigured as an eagle, for only his gospel gives us these lofty glimpses into the greatest of the mysteries of the faith, unfolding in the ocean of God’s eternal moment. When we speak of the eternal mode for our prayers or our thoughts, we are dipping our toes in that great ocean, even though we remain for now on the shoreline of human history and time.

Then, we come to the second aspect of this gospel: Jesus’ prayers for those the Father had given Him. Please God that we number among those whom Jesus prays for at that moment, for while His sacrifice was offered for all, not all receive His truth and His love, as St John has told us from the very first chapter of the gospel. But note here the emphasis: those who are taken to the bosom of the Father by the Son are a gift from the Father to the Son. They are part of an eternal exchange of love. The dignity and the glory of those who enter His happiness are summed up in this: that as the Father communicates everything to the Son, so He restores through the Son’s prayer His wayward creatures to this ever-living and unstoppable cascade of divine self-giving. Here, our vocation is universal: to be in our own particular way one small reflection of that unified light and life of the Living God whose very being is love poured out.

The only response befitting such revelation is that great silence of heaven retold in the Book of Revelation at the start of Chapter 8. Lost in wonder, all we can do is wish to echo the prayer of the Son’s Sacred Heart, and speak our love, our 'yes' and our 'thank you' with Mary, back into the eternal harmony that lies between Father, Son and Holy Spirit: their gift to us the life in which to share; their gift to us the means by which to share that life.

In our end is our beginning, but in their love lies our end. Pray for us, dear Sacred Heart, that we may be yours and the Father’s for ever and ever. Amen.

 

The mission goes ever on and on

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 28: 16-20) focuses our minds on the sending of the apostles during the last chapter of the gospel of St Matthew. There stood the eleven in a wavering state of mind, some adoring Jesus, some doubting Him, and all of them surely wondering what was coming next.

What came next was in some ways only a continuation of what had come before, but it was also a transformation of it. Now, the Lord hands on His mission to His chosen ones, sending them out as He too had been sent, bearing His task, labouring in His name and for the glory of His Father. The dynamic of the mission comes from the outpouring of grace and holiness that Jesus wins for us in His death and resurrection and which the Holy Spirit communicates to us through the ministry of the Church, through His personal gifts, and through His own presence.   

Notice the two sides of this mission: Go… baptising them … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. These orders – the last ones Jesus gives the Apostles - place the tasks of sanctification and teaching at the heart of the mission. Note the nuance also: all that I have commanded; not half of it, not a best-bits version, not a bowdlerised copy with the tough bits omitted, not tailored for the shifting fashions and sensitivities of the age which will be something else by the end of next week. The teaching is to be given in season and out o season, for our desperate humanity needs not only consolation but conversion. The woundedness and needs of the human heart are much the same from age to age, no matter the prevailing winds, no matter how many castles in the air are built by our pride and our self-indulgence, not matter how delusional we become about new ages and year zeros. Below the changing currents at our surface lie the same rip tides that always bedevil us, quite literally at times: we are always damaged goods. Fashion chasing is for fools, not for followers of the Lord.

We see also in these two tasks an order and a logic: sanctification and then teaching. In time, the Church will come to say: Lex orandi lex credendi - the law of prayer is the law of belief. Because in point of fact, while truth perfects our minds, we can never truly understand the mysteries that Jesus has revealed to us. We do not need to fabricate mystery: God’s revelation is all a mystery of love and transcendence that surpasses our human capacities; of love, because God is good and total love is the response to total goodness, and of transcendence, because God is holy and we are the creatures who, along with the angels, were given the capacity to be conscious of what it is to honour freely their creator. At the same time, because it is possible for us to be misled by our own lights, the Church also reverses the law stated above and says: Lex credendi lex orandi – the law of belief is the law of prayer. Even the greatest mystics submitted their insights in prayer to the Church for she is the custodian of Revelation and faith.

If all this seems a tall order, Jesus gives the apostles one last consolation in this gospel: that even though He leaves them bodily, He is with them always until the end of the age. With them and with us in His sacred words of course; but because our total sanctification is His goal, sanctification meaning radical union with Him, He is with them and us pre-eminently in His Eucharistic presence the mystery of which will unfold over the centuries. He is with them and with us lastly in the Spirit which He sends into the world from the Father to remind us of all things and grant a deeper appreciation of them.

The procession of goodness, therefore, goes on, beginning with the persons of the Blessed Trinity, in essence one, through the hands of the ministers of Christ commissioned to share His gospel, through the action of the Spirit, and through all those who make themselves docile instruments of the purposes of Providence in this world.

In the end, to be apostolic is to become a willing channel of the great fount of gifts that pours out of the communion of the Blessed Trinity and breaks forth in this world from the rock which is Christ, who is admitted to this world by Mary’s great yes and who is handed on in the willing yeses of the faithful disciples. The apostolate that we in COLW aspire to is nothing other than to do our part to facilitate this flow of His goodness into the world, through the Church, through the hands of Mary, channelled through our poor minds and hearts and – please God – into the ears and hearts of our neighbours, families, and friends. We only need to let ourselves be the voices, hands, and feet that the Master sends forth into the world.

What a mission, what a hope! How little we have done and how much remains to be undertaken. But listen again to His last word to us: behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Leave to remain

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

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In today’s gospel (John 16: 5-11), we continue to listen to Jesus’ discourse after the Last Supper, further explaining His mission, the mission of the Holy Spirit, and the path that lay ahead of the apostles who, in just a little over fifty days, would inherit His mission to the rest of the world. They are sad but, Jesus explains, He must leave so that they may receive another Helper who will enlighten the world about sin, righteousness, and judgement. Let us leave aside the last mysterious remark for another reflection and focus instead on Jesus’ even more mysterious remark at the beginning:

It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.

The Helper here is better known in Christian discourse as the Paraclete, but what can Jesus mean by this conditional phrase: If I do not go away, He will not come? Cannot God do everything? Have we reached here the limits of One we formerly called the Almighty? Indeed, if He is to go away, must we not also wonder that Jesus would later say that He will be with them always, even to the end of the world? Our Saviour is as ever enigmatic. He is not an instruction booklet to be unfolded and skimmed by simplistic minds. He is the Truth whose words cut to the very quick of those who are blessed enough, and who dare, to raise their eyes to look for Him, even the simple. What then does He mean here? Let us dare to ask …

Jesus, who is with us always in the Eucharistic presence, has yet gone away in His historical presence; He has left the ambit of our planet in the cosmos not by His presence and power but only in the physical dimension of His incarnation. Body and blood He remains with us, but sacramentally only, i.e. under other physical appearances that are signs of an unseen reality and that make real His presence. We are amazed at those who looked upon the Babe and saw the Saviour of the World, but everyone who professes their belief in the Eucharist performs an even greater wonder of faith, looking upon a fragment of what appears to be bread and by faith knowing – discerning, as St Paul says – mysteriously but overwhelmingly the real presence of the Lord.

But, why then would the Paraclete not have come if Jesus had not left us in the historical, material and physical sense? Imagine the impact. We would not be going to Rome to see the pope but to see Jesus Himself! Perhaps He would have continued to perform miracles! Would not the whole world have been converted in a carnival of conviction? Would not the Trumps and Ayatollahs of War have bent their knees to the peacemaker? Would not the Dawkins and the Frys have had their every doubt solved like Nicodemus in the night? In other words, did Jesus get it wrong? Surely, He needed a better PR strategy! Think how close His kingdom was, instead of which He left its fate in the hands of the amateurs, the illiterates, and – worst of all - the zealots!

But I think we need to temper this enticingly counterfactual history of Christianity, of what might have been, and not only because sometimes these things are mysterious and held under the veil of His inscrutable wisdom. Just look at Israel at the time of Jesus. Not everyone believed. Indeed, the maddening thing about those privileged witnesses of the steps of the Messiah is that so many of them saw and yet remained unmoved; or else they saw and yet stopped seeking for Him when they encountered a difficulty; or else their hearts were pitted against Him from the beginning, and the more He showed Himself to be who He was, the more they sank in their satanic resistance. The counterfactual idea the whole world would have converted had Jesus stayed needs to be consigned to the garbage dump of history, along with the comfortable notion that everybody is sincere, everybody means well, and that good will is everywhere. It is not that we judge hearts - that is God's business; rather, it is that the gospel has taught us to understand that there is a lot more going on in the average human heart than appears on the surface…

And that is the point, indeed perhaps the very reason why Jesus had to go. A physically present Jesus performing regularly in Rome like P. T. Barnum in his circus ring would have risked making it possible for the world to carry on with its surface level engagement with His message. The world would have been like Pontius Pilate who was physically present to the Lord but whose heart seemingly remained closed. Perhaps worst of all, a physically present Jesus from whom we could be physically distant might have made us think we had no deep work to do in our own hearts. But our illness is of another kind.

What a wonder such a continuing physical presence of Jesus would have been, except that it is dwarfed utterly by the even greater wonder that the Lord through the Spirit now accompanies every single one of us on those inner paths within, down the valleys and abysses of our own hearts, to bring us to knowledge of our own great woundedness and of His infinitely greater power to heal and to raise us up after sin. Lost in the raging waters of discordant needs, undue attachments and blood-red revolt, we are rescued time and again by the Fisher King of souls, the one and the same God who created the world, took flesh in Jesus Christ, and who comes to us to recreate us anew if we will but walk these paths with Him, follow the surgeon’s knife and allow Him to cut out the poison, and replace it with His infinite goodness. And thus we will pray in the exquisite poetry of the Pentecost Sequence:

 

Lava quod est sordidum, (Cleanse what is unclean),

Riga quod est aridum, (water what is parched),

sana quod est saucium, (heal what is wounded).

 

Flecte quod est rigidum, (Bend what is inflexible),

fove quod est frigidum, (warm what is chilled),

rege quod est devium (correct what has gone astray).

Veni Sante Spiritus

 

If He had not gone away, would He work such wonders now within us? And that is the point.

In His going away, we have paradoxically a sign and a promise of His visitation.