The missing link

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 2: 33-35) gives us a brief moment in the lives of Mary and Joseph but one in which Jesus takes centre stage, identified as Saviour by the words of Simeon who is, so to speak, the last but one prophet of the Old Testament, followed only by John the Baptist. Yet, as brief as the moment is, how many truths these lines contain.

First, we have a glimpse into the interior lives of Joseph and Mary for, as Saint Luke tells us, they marvelled at what was said about the child. One of the fundamental virtues that they both exercised throughout their lives was the virtue of faith, utterly necessary insofar as the immense prophecies that surrounded their son were often contradicted by the difficult and thankless circumstances in which they often found themselves. Faith was the virtue that Saint Elizabeth most praised in Mary for she was blessed in having believed the words that had been spoken to her.

Next, we hear the words of Simeon's prophecy about the role Jesus would play in the life of Israel. Here, we must understand Israel both in a concrete and in a spiritual sense, in the sense both of His own people and of the spiritual Israel constituted by His mystical body:

Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed.

Why is this so? Why is not everything done and finished, indeed accomplished, with the action of Jesus alone? Quite simply because redemption is not yet salvation; quite simply because, as paradoxical as it is, there is something lacking in the sufferings of Christ, as Saint Paul tells the Colossians. There is a portion to be made-up, and that portion is seen in our transformation in Christ by which we become the adopted children of the Father and bear the duties of the First Born with a true co-responsibility. To be a Christian is not simply to profess His name and recognise Him as our personal Lord and Saviour; if that were sufficient, than, all those who say Lord, Lord would indeed enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

More is needed. The rise and fall of many in Israel will come about because some will follow Him into death and resurrection, and some will choose not to. Some will recognise that the mystery of His passion and His glory must become their own mystery, and some will not. Some will accept that their own story must be written into His story, and some will not. And This is why He is opposed. We should not be surprised at those who reject Him, and neither should we despair; God alone keeps the secret of all hearts. This is the mystery of iniquity, and we have been warned to expect it.

Lastly, this gospel draws back a curtain on the extraordinary mystery of how Mary herself enters the passion and resurrection of her Son. At the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus asks her directly:

What is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.

In other words, what Simeon's prophecy anticipates – the piercing of Mary’s heart by a sword - is in fact Mary's vocation to be associated with Jesus in the fall and the rise of Israel. How could we doubt that in this prophecy we hear Mary's personal vocation: not her active vocation to mother the Saviour of humanity, but her personal vocation that means of all human creatures she is the one most closely associated with the hour of the Saviour.

And this too is why the purpose of the piercing of her heart is that the thoughts of many may be revealed. For in our personal vocations, that particular dimension of the inexhaustible beauty of God which He has appointed to us to reflect is shown forth to the world. In this moment, Mary is shown not only as His mother but also as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, the human creature who is drawn most deeply into God's outpouring of Himself: in His creation, in His work of redemption, and now down the ages of the Church in His work of sanctification.

Jesus is the bridge maker but Mary is the bridge head: His first conquest, His greatest masterpiece, and His most intimate cooperator, working then, and even now, to make up in her own sufferings, her own sorrows, the sufferings that are lacking to the passion of Christ for the sake of His body, the Church.

None so blind

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 6:39-42) presents us with Jesus’ teachings on the connection between purity of intention and clear moral vision. The blind cannot lead the blind. It is a teaching which comes into even greater focus when applied to the criticism of others and when, Jesus tells us, we are in even greater danger of hypocrisy. 

First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

In this conclusion, not only does Jesus tell us what we must do – i.e. wash our own laundry before criticising others for not washing theirs - but He also reminds us how our perceptions of the faults of others are often distorted. Yet the problem of hypocrisy and the challenge of reforming ourselves before trying to reform others only arise from the difficulty that Jesus pinpoints at the outset: 

can the blind lead the blind? 

Yet, what does He mean in this?

The scholastics used to say: every comparison limps except in the point of comparison. What blind people lack in vision, they often compensate for by some other extraordinary facility or other. Still, Jesus’ comparison here is apt. By saying the blind cannot lead the blind, what He means is that those who lack moral and spiritual insight cannot effectively enable others to see morally and spiritually. Very few people intentionally blind themselves; but when it comes to a loss of moral vision, we face three difficulties.

The first is that a certain moral blindness is one of the wounds of original sin; to be human is to be born blind in a sense. 

The second is that we rarely know all the facts around another’s case and need to be wary of prejudging their situation. Going after the log in our brother’s eye is interference, but it is almost always an error of judgement to begin with.

The third difficulty is that our own moral failings create, as it were, our own moral and spiritual cataracts of various hues and colours that block our vision. Our minds easily turn rose tinted with blind optimism, perhaps dark and sombre with sour pessimism, or even a jaundiced yellow from world-weary cynicism. We fall into folly through thoughtlessness, or perhaps into wilful depression through a lack of hope. God forbid we lapse at times into cynical scorn, knowing the price of things without weighing their value. All of these denote in themselves barriers that we unwittingly erect to the fruitfulness the Holy Spirit wants to bring forth in us.

How different we are then from those visionaries Elizabeth and Mary who meet and greet each other in a spirit of faith. Where we fumble in our pride, they perceive God’s ways in humility; while we unconsciously revel in our mistaken superiority, they let go and let God, waiting for His light in patience, rather than rushing to simulate their own.

To try to pick out the speck in our brother’s eye before removing the log from our own is, from a COLW perspective, to place mission before contemplation; it is to favour activity over reflection, or to deny to the apostolate the benefits of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. After all, if we knew ourselves like Elizabeth and Mary did, we would not appoint missions to ourselves, but wait in joyful hope for the beginning and end of all mission, the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Only in that school can we learn assuredly the lessons that Dom Chautard shared with the Church a hundred years ago: that contemplation is the soul of the apostolate, that faith is the condition of knowing God and coming to the truth about ourselves, and that overreaching activism and frenetic doings should be recognised for the blindness that they are.

Late summer recess

 The blog is now on a late summer recess until 11 September. God bless all readers.

Fools rush in

 For an audio recording of today's gospel and blog, follow this link.

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Today’s gospel of the wise and foolish virgins or bridesmaids (Matthew 25: 1-13) relates the familiar parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins who fall asleep while awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom; when they awake only the wise ones can enter the feast, while the foolish are left in the outer darkness for the bridegroom does not know them. 

For all the apparent simplicity of this parable, however, the wise and the foolish virgins are not so clearly distinguished as in the parable. Jesus makes it easy for us by labelling some of them wise and some of them foolish, but what if He had not? What if we had to distinguish the wisdom and the foolishness for ourselves? 

If we did not know the end of the parable – if we had to write it ourselves – who would enter the banquet? Some might imagine, for example, that the foolish virgins (in Jesus’ eyes) were in fact the wise ones, and that the wise ones (in Jesus’ eyes) were nothing less than foolish. How is that? In a spirit of competition, let’s call them Team Foolish and Team Wise and see how they fare.

First, Team Foolish brought no oil with them. Well, of course not. Jesus had invited them to consider the lilies of the field who neither sow nor reap. Why take additional oil, they might have said, when Jesus has told us not to store things up like the rich fool in Luke chapter 12?

Moreover, is Team Wise, who take extra oil, really thinking about the bridegroom? They seem to be plotting and planning the material ‘what ifs’ of life, unlike Team Foolish who only have eyes for the bridegroom. Team Wise seem like the overly busy Marys of this life, whereas Team Foolish seem like the wise Marys.

Lastly, Team Foolish expect the necessities from the hands of others, as Jesus bids the 72 disciples whom He sends out on mission in Luke chapter 10; surely if a worker deserves his wages, so too does a bridesmaid. Team Wise in contrast disobey Jesus’ command during the Sermon on the Mount that if someone asks for your shirt (or your oil), give them your cloak as well…

Does Jesus have this all wrong then? Does He confuse the wise and the foolish virgins? Why does Jesus praise Team Wise who depend on themselves, who calculate, and who refuse to share? Why is it Team Wise who enter the wedding celebrations while Team Foolish - who did not store things up, refused to plot, and only begged for what they needed - were excluded?

The answer perhaps lies in the fact that all the bridesmaids were there for the mission. It is not that Team Wise were being calculating and selfish. Team Wise are the team that had their eyes fixed on the purpose of their role; not simply on themselves, their own status, their own arrival at success and recognition. They understood they were part of a bigger scheme; that their service was not just about their own perfection and fulfilment, but about how they disposed all things for the service of the bridegroom. 

Team Foolish in contrast could not see beyond the achievement of being named as bridesmaids; in a sense they were a breed of female clericalists who confused their office with their value in God's eyes. As bridesmaids, they had finally made it, so to speak ... and they became complacent. All their superficial obedience to Jesus’ commands was out of context; they were logical, but as Chesterton says: life is not illogical but it is a trap for logicians. When Team Wise calculated about the oil, it was not due to personal anxiety; it was the wisdom of stewardship applied to their role. If their lights went out, it was not that they had to sit in darkness; it was rather that the bridegroom’s entry and feasting would be threatened with darkness. The same applied to their refusal to share their oil. It was not theirs to share but the bridegroom's. Right now, there is a lot of fuss in parts of the Church about the status of women, whereas the gospel teaches that the value of women or of men, or indeed bridesmaids, lies not in their office but in their loving service, wherever they may be. 

Team Foolish knew what they had to do up to a point, but Team Wise knew what was their purpose. And because they knew their purpose, they were not focused on themselves but on the carrying out of their mission which was, after all never their own to begin with but something gifted to them. Not all those who say, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus’ conclusion to this parable is, nevertheless, a warning. Stay awake! He admonishes all. The success of Team Wise is not really to their credit; like Team Foolish they fell asleep on the job. When all is said and when our duty is done be it ne'er so humble, we are only ever unprofitable servants, raised by His mercy to a blessed estate. Nobody, therefore, can afford to be complacent, not the wisest among us.

My song is love unknown

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 22: 34-40) should be a moment of joy, but casting a long shadow over it is the malice of the Pharisees whose intention is not remotely to discuss the greatest commandment but rather to disconcert Jesus. In this simple exchange we find a gulf between the interlocutors, despite their commonly held religion. Yet as Jesus says elsewhere, judge not according to appearances but according to justice.

On one side of this gulf stand the Pharisees who hold themselves to be the most faithful adherents of the Law. Yet they cannot see the wood for the trees, nor that the Law forbids the malice with which their question is put. They are, in other words, so absorbed in the pursuit of material conformity with the Law that it has become a tool in their hands – a tool for self-aggrandisement and a tool to exercise power over their neighbours, rather than their path towards God. Instead of directing them towards salvation, therefore, the Law condemns their entire modus operandi, and every step entangles them deeper in the mire.

Yet, let us not do as the Pharisees do and consider ourselves above their example. We could very well ask in what ways we are guilty of turning our religion into a means of self-service, rather than the service of God. Do we use it unconsciously to prop up our dissonant needs or wounded sense of self? Do we revel in material conformity with its exacting standards, forgetting that God calls us to a life of outward-turning love, rather than self-admiring perfection? Does it become in us a fashionable fetish, rather than a call to faithfulness? In other words, do we really follow Him, or have we unconsciously erected our own discreet idols in His place? Are we serving our Maker, or are we in some subtle way on the make? Only the quiet contemplation of God can illuminate who and what we are.

Standing on the other side of the gulf from the Pharisees is Jesus who answers their malicious questioning thus: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second commandment follows from it logically: You must love your neighbour as yourself, although as we know, Jesus gives a new commandment at the Last Supper: love one another as I have loved you – a commandment so sublime, we seldom mention it, and rarely if ever obey it.

How different would we be if indeed we followed these two commandments; if the law of our hearts and minds – our inner movements and our very thoughts - was that ray of light that plunges into us from the contemplation of the God of love? When we love something – this is the teaching of those supposedly bone-dry scholastics of the Middle Ages – we become like it. When we love God – truly loving Him above all other things – then that love becomes an ultimate law that reshapes us from the inside, not like a legal regulation; more like a mass of energy that brings other things under its all-powerful influence. When the love of God is our law, we are like planets to His sun.

Yet the idea of likeness is also important, because if in loving God we become like Him, we cannot but then love others, first because He loves them also and, second, because our hearts seek out in them what reminds us of our first love, God. Thus, it is easy to love a saint in whom we easily see God’s reflection, but a saint finds it easy to love the sinner, even the worst. We do not think enough on this implication of the law of love. So tribal do we become in defending our beleaguered patch of ground in this secular world, we forget that the worst among our enemies are the ones who are most deprived of God, and, therefore, the most to be pitied and indeed loved. Like the first law of thermal dynamics, truth is love and love is truth. We love one another because God has commanded it, and, nevertheless, the truth that everyone, even the worst of us, resembles God in some way, can become the cause of our love for them. The greater their fall from the truth of their being, the more they are to be pitied and loved. This is why the shepherd goes out and leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one that is lost.

Where I am, there must my servant be also, said Jesus in the gospel on the feast of St Lawrence. And the gospel of St John allows us to see exactly where Jesus is: for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

And so, the conclusion is clear: we must love even the malicious Pharisees who would cast the shadow of their ill-will across the pastures that might otherwise be lit by the love of God. Only light drives out darkness. Only God is their salvation and ours,

My saviour’s love to me,

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

Seeing is believing

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 23-30) allows us to hear four of Jesus’ most notable sayings: first, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; second, that with God all things are possible; third, that all those who have left houses, brothers, sisters, etc for His name’s sake would receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life; and fourth, that many who are first will be last, and the last first.

These conversations must have come back to St Matthew while pondering on his many memories of the Lord. Maybe he discussed them with other disciples. Jesus probably said these things and similar ones many times in many circumstances. For us He dwells in His words, but for those who had actually met Him, He must also have dwelt in these memories, vivid in their mind’s eyes, His accent and the timbre of His voice sounding again on their inner ears. The disciples who slowly learned to live the Sacred Mysteries of the liturgy, founded on the ritual and Scriptural disciplines of their Jewish origins, first lived that Sacred Mystery of His presence on earth, and then lived and relived it how many thousands of times in their memories and minds. We have the following testimony from another evangelist, St John, in the first of his epistles:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

St John is so overwhelmed with His recollection of Jesus and wants to get across to his readers that wonderous thing: that the eternal mystery of the Son living in the Father had dwelt for a time among them, and they had seen and looked upon Him, and touched Him, and now recalled Him in their preaching continually. How true of both St Matthew and St John must be these words from Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

[…]

 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

    and on His law he meditates day and night.

But we might change these words a little and say now:

But His delight is in the mysteries of the Lord,

    and on His mysteries he meditates day and night.

For in the Old Testament, God appeared to Moses, and Moses spent forty days and nights with Him before returning from Mount Sinai with the Law of the Decalogue. Whereas in the New Testament, God Himself walked among us and taught us, before seeming to desert Himself on Mount Calvary, and then, on the third day, returned not from a mountain but from the abyss of death with the Pascal Mystery of Life written not onto stone but into His resurrected flesh. The Law remains but now He is Flesh and Blood.

So, what has all this got to do with the sayings of Jesus today in the gospel? Only that we cannot read these passages like so many sayings and dictums of a sage, or of another wiseman, or another parallel repository of wisdom like the Dharma of Buddha, the Hindus’ Bhagavat Gita, the sayings of Confucius, or the Surahs of the Quran; as if all religions were merely different paths that led to the same God. Jesus is not firstly an ethicist but a divine mystery for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. He is not primarily a book but a revelation:

the only Son of God, 
eternally begotten of the Father, 
God from God, Light from Light, 
true God from true God, 
begotten, not made, 
consubstantial, with the Father.

We do not approach Him by pedagogy, like we approach Maths and Physics and Ethics. We know Him rather by a mystagogy which we encounter in the Sacred Liturgy, primarily the Eucharist, source and summit of the Church’s life, and then in the Sacred Scriptures, not as some separate path or province of sayings and doings, but as a reality somehow conjoined to the Mysteries of the Incarnate Lord; a mystery in itself, inspired but not dictated by the Holy Spirit; the work of human hands and yet divine in its origin and in its effects. For with God nothing is impossible.

To be the rich man condemned in the words of today’s Gospel extract is to be so besotted with the things of this world that we miss the reality of these mysteries. Moreover, to break the bread of Scripture together is to receive already some of that hundredfold that He promised His faithful ones. And to receive His Word and His very self, leaving all else behind, is to overturn the human ordering of our material world where power pushes in for first prize, and the anawim, the little lovers of His great Mysteries, often find themselves pushed out, strangers to their neighbours for the truth has made them strange.

And yet, it still remains that we are called to serve the Sacred Mysteries even in the contorted and impatient faces of the enemy who rail against His teachings, not daring ourselves to grab onto the advantages of a false peace with this world, not raising our hand against its servants (for His kingdom is not of this world), but loving them as the Divine Master loved them, for where the Masters is, there must the disciples follow.

The last who is made first is the Divine Master who in the mystery of His incarnation became

despised and rejected by men;
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

And this is the mystery which, in the end, St Matthew related in the pages of his gospel: not a teacher of ethics, or a strange oriental prophet, but the promised Messiah, unrecognisable except to those who had broken together that fragment of the Book of Isaiah and lived with it – lived with its mystery - in their hearts. And when we now break apart these fragments of the gospel, we hope by the power of His Holy Spirit to see into

the mystery which we have heard in our inner ear, which we have seen with the eyes of our minds, which we have looked upon in our imaginations and touched with our hearts’ aspirations.

Thus is His life made manifest, and we see it, and must testify to it.

Teachability and blind spots

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 3-12) once again shows the Pharisees coming to Jesus in an attempt to entrap Him, but despite their worst endeavours, this scene offers up several beautiful mysteries for our contemplation: the Christian laws of marriage, as God intended it from the beginning; the union of the spouses in one flesh; the gift of purity as it is given by God. There is here what one writer has called a Mysterierenlehre – a mysteriology in the sense that we may learn something through the mysteries. Yet from a COLW perspective, one sentence stands out amid all the others: that Moses tolerated divorce in the Old Testament because the people of God were so unteachable.

If we think of unteachability as a strictly intellectual limitation, we have not really understood all its implications. Another word for lack of teachability here would be hardness of heart. It was not just that there was a mental blind spot among God’s chosen ones; theirs was a moral refusal to rise to the responsibility enjoined by what God had established from the beginning. In mitigation, we should remember that the age of grace was not yet fully born before Jesus’ death on the Cross.

There is a correlation, therefore, between the higher expectations in the teachings of Jesus and the fulness of grace that His redemption makes available to us. His condescension to our weakness – His mercy on the sinner - is not a ticket for us to wallow in irresponsibility or indulgence. Jesus does not make cushions to put beneath the elbows of sinners, as false prophets do in the Book of Ezekiel. His mercy is a route out of our misery.  But how?

We become more teachable in two ways. First, our minds become more teachable when we allow our imaginations to embrace the breadth of God’s mysteries. In the nighttime discussion with Nicodemus, Jesus leads Nicodemus to see things in new ways. Nicodemus becomes, as it were, a model of teachability, allowing his imagination to become receptive to things beyond his normal ken. It is not that he is a passive listener, far from it; rather, he is an attentive questioner, and Jesus unfolds for him not only the mysteries of the past, but the promise of the new revelation that His own coming signifies. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our normally limited philosophies. In an age when our visions have become narrowed to the limited breadth of our mobile devices, our minds and our Christian imaginations need to find their way back to the soaring breadth and height that our medieval cathedrals still symbolise for us. Like Dostoevsky said of Russia, we need to sit at the feet of Christ again and learn His gospel.

Yet, the second way we become more teachable is through our gradual surrender to the Father’s forming action, shaping now not only our minds but our hearts through His grace, enabling us to rise to the mysteries that He reveals and strengthening our wills to choose the responsibilities these mysteries call us to.

Our greatest tragedy is sin unrepented, but after that comes this tragedy of this unteachability which stunts and limits us, withers God’s work, undoes our best resolutions, even those of half an hour ago, renders us partially fruitless, and makes us spiritually sterile by our own childish hands.

Who will free me from the body of this death, says St Paul – from the blind spots and refusals that mar the work of God in us? Thanks be to God – He concludes - who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

 

Carousel

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 18: 1-5, 10, 12-14) sees the disciples preoccupied with that question of success which we discussed last week. Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Jesus’s response must have surprised them, for His measure of success was by no means an earthly one, but entirely divine: whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  The rest of the gospel is then an extended set of metaphors on the preciousness of even the least of the disciples: it is not the will of my Father in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

This should be a gospel dear to all members of COLW for our Book of Life identifies us as anawim, the lowly ones of the Lord, the servants, the humble ones, who claim no special status, even though they know that they are precious in the eyes of the Father. Like all great truths, this insight into the ways of God contains extremes that reconcile in paradoxical unity, for it draws the disciples’ elevated expectations of what greatness is into the light that shines from the simplicity and innocence of the child whom Jesus brought into their circle. It also draws together those seemingly contradictory truths that honour, the reward of great achievement, is bestowed upon children of the kingdom as the beloved of our Father above. Even the least of us is ennobled, regardless of our talents, our successes, or our attractiveness.

In this moment, we learn of greatness in the eyes of God, and yet we also feel keenly that it is not the same as greatness in the eyes of men, nor does Jesus’ praise of the child align with our own ambient values. In our times, we are used to the celebration of youth, and parents habitually profess their undying love for their children. I am reminded of a verse from Chesterton’s Songs of Education:

I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance at somebody’s bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.

For reasons that Chesterton himself could see even a hundred years ago, never has childhood itself been so oppressed spiritually as it is in our contemporary societies where immersion in digital and screen culture ruins mental health and innocence on a daily basis, and bends souls so out of shape that it often leaves them stuck along a spectrum of immaturity. How must their angels grieve who see in one and the same moment the eternal face of God to whose vision their wards are called and the awful chaos that has been wrought in the souls of the young by devilry or carelessness? There is good reason to assert a preferential option for the young, and yet that option must be clearsighted about current realities.

Yet we would be missing something important if we assumed Jesus in this gospel meant to refer to human childhood alone as an exhaustive model of divine greatness. Whoever humbles himself like this child…Who is the child in the scene but Jesus Himself, the child of the Father, the only one in the scene who does not need to turn and become like a child? For it is possible even for a child to leave childhood early, driven out of their home by precocious vice or corrupting influences. Then, not only the adults but the children too will need to hear Jesus’ call: Unless you turn… you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself…is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Unless we turn, i.e. unless we become like Jesus of whom we must learn for he is meek and humble of heart. Benedictines traditionally took a vow of conversion of life, an odd choice if we examine their path only from the outside. Does a religious need conversion? Are they not beyond such a basic task? But we hear the reality here in the gospel. It was a reality known to the disciples who had spent all this time in the presence of the Lord. To them, Jesus says: unless you turn… We turn first of all perhaps in our most shallow sentiments. We catch that breeze of enthusiasm and find in the turn an easy task for the heart. But then, we begin to find the turn difficult, as it requires now not only an emotional investment but an investment in the reform of our habits. We feel the G-forces of sin and selfishness, tugging at our efforts to follow the Lord, and if we persevere, God’s grace can maintain us on our trajectory. But the turn is still not yet done, for we are not yet converted all the way to the bottom of our hearts. On this merry-go-round of conversion, turning again is the only way forward; there is deep inner work to do, and while all our outward appearances may seem Christian, He has not yet fully conquered us until we allow Him to dwell in our very depths, to remake us utterly in His image so that we may now be as the little child in the midst of the disciples.

It is not the will of the Father that we little ones should perish, but unless we turn, we cannot enter His kingdom. The challenge of greatness is not the challenge of human achievement, nor the conquest of glory on the way to success and accumulation. The challenge of greatness comes in our readiness to take on this lesson of humility that is found in the Eternal Child, the Son of the Eternal One, and so to be worthy - or a little less unworthy - of the precious gaze that the Father casts upon us. 

The wages of suffering

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 24-28) challenges us in our deepest understanding of what it means to be a success in life. If we will be His disciples, then, like those Sons of Thunder James and John, and like Peter, the newly appointed pope, who had just been rebuked as Satan by the Lord Himself in verse 23 of this chapter, we too must be ready to lose ourselves to save our souls, or at least to lose the idea we have made of ourselves, our own unwitting deity of the hearth. Let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me, says the Lord. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. A man may yet gain the whole world, but if it comes at the price of his eternal soul, what is that really worth? For God will repay every person according to what he has done, and what if one of us has chosen the appearances over the reality, or the temporal over the everlasting?

Sometimes, the gospel calls us to encounter the Lord, and then we are overwhelmed with awe at the Master and Shepherd on whose face we dare to cast our gaze, But sometimes the gospel calls us not so much to encounter the Lord but to take a look at ourselves, and before we know it, the Scriptures hold up a mirror before our stained and deformed faces, and then Lord help us if we refuse in our hearts to perceive what our mind’s eye is given to see.

We humans are born romantics with a longing for the safety of the womb. No wonder we get excited at the exaltation of our hearts over the consolations of wisdom or even, God help us, at the excitement of something we hardly realise is probably cheap and nasty religious sensationalism. But here in this gospel, the Lord points firmly to the path that leads to eternal wisdom, and to our surprise, it is not along a dainty primrose path to nicer feelings, but rather via that stoney road that leads us to Mount Calvary where eternal joy embraces an abyss of temporary sorrow. Not that way, Lord, surely, we say; even St Therese of Lisieux said it. And, yet we hear again and again the words of the Lord:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

This is not by the way a school of stoicism. Christ is not issuing His disciples merely with an agenda of heroic forbearance, like some Navy Seal instructor. Notice the pronouns: follow me; deny himself. This is not a code primarily, but a creed not of self-belief but of belief in the Eternal Other. It is a call to cast our eyes upon Him who promises to be for us the source of all our strength:

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

And, then, St Paul will give echo to this reality:

I live; now not I, but Christ lives in me.

If we in that moment have not the courage to say our fiat beneath the cross, what does it matter? Let us invite Him to say His fiat to the Father in us! And from that moment, we can allow our sails to be filled again with the gentle breeze of His Holy Spirit, resigning ourselves not to our misery, but rather to His kind embrace that picks us up and carries us forward. Then, perhaps, when we have wept for our sins, we can smile a little on our own misery, no longer wounded in our pride by our consistent inconsistency, but touched like Him with compassion for the broken.

Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

In that surrender to His almighty hand lies in fact the secret of our personal vocations, our particular callings, by which we are meant to reflect some dimension of the beauty of the Eternal One. When Jesus says to lose our lives, He does not mean our real lives in Him, but our fake lives, our tawdry and self-constructed lives, the ghastly castles we have built from our pound-shop plans and our mass-produced lusts; the lives our impoverished imaginations have designed, the existences our grasping fingers have drawn in the sands of our passing years. This is what we must lose; not the things that reflect Him and thus invigorate us, but the things that are merely the grotesque reflection of our own lack of eternal aspiration. There, where we have wedded our hearts not to His dreams but to our cheap designs: that is where the axe must be laid to the root of the tree.

This is no once-and-for-all moment, it is a daily duty, for the cross must be taken up every day. Cats have nine lives, they say, but the old man in us seems to be capable of an endless number of zombie-like resuscitations, stirring from the ashes of our last repentance, attempting to draw us back down into the mire that we never quite lose the taste for. Such is the legacy of original sin, overcome but never entirely erased, as even St Paul could testify:

To keep me from being too elated, he tells the Corinthians, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

In this incarnational agenda, therefore, our own life story finds its glory, but only and always at the end of the journey that goes by the royal way of the cross.

Blind in both eyes

A recording of the gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

*****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 15: 1-2, 10-14) brings us another episode in which Jesus is questioned insincerely by the Pharisees and scribes. The extract read in today’s liturgy omits verses 3-9 in which Jesus demonstrates the Pharisees’ insincerity with regard to the fourth commandment, making it void so one of their rules could be observed. Quoting Isaiah, He tells the crowd:

This people honours me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
 in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.

We do, however, hear Jesus explain that food cannot make a person impure; rather, impurity is the effect of a wayward heart. As for the Pharisees, He concludes, they are blind guides, and their actions will bring about their own doom and the doom of those who blindly follow them.

This then is a spikey encounter that occurs during the late Galilean ministry but before Peter’s appointment as the ‘rock’ and Jesus’ final journey towards Jerusalem. It is a gospel which encourages us to reflect on the mystery of our own call as disciples: a call to listen and hear carefully, but a call also to internalise the lessons given. Do we consciously sit everyday at His feet and try to hear His gospel? Are we doing so even now, letting its words search our hearts and test our deepest motives?

The case of the Pharisees should stand as a warning to us, as we undergo that process. Who were reputedly the best Jews if not the Pharisees? Who knew the Scriptures better, and who observed the law more carefully than they? And yet, Jesus criticises them mercilessly – if such an epithet can be said of the merciful Saviour. How did they end up as the blind ones, leading other blind followers into the pit? We are accustomed to think of mysteries only in a positive sense, but here we are faced with a kind of mystery of iniquity.  

Jesus’ words suggest two problems. The easier one to understand is simply that the Pharisees are blind guides. Human beings proceed by insight. Even those who prefer to think of their religion as an affair of the heart require some kind of light where their minds perceive the truth to lie. That is why it is so dangerous just to be a sentimentalist. As Chesterton said, the aim of opening one’s mind, as of opening one’s mouth, is to close it again on something solid. The need for insight and direction, indeed, our lack of insight and direction, is brought home to us by Jesus describing Himself as the way, the truth and the life: the way for we need His direction, and the truth for our minds are like an image of the Son’s relationship to the Father, begetting truth through internalising the act of another’s being (not that the Father causes the being of the Son; their being is one, but it is always hard to speak of that mystery!). When Jesus says the blind cannot lead the blind, He is saying that error cannot of itself lead to anything but error. Notice He does not say here that we must focus only on what unites us with the Pharisees. Unfortunately, some things must be called out lest the blind mislead the blind and both fall into the pit. Truths have consequences, especially the most controverted ones.

So, there are serious implications that arise from this, the first and the easier of the problems with the Pharisees. One is that the pious are wasting their time and the Lord’s if they are just superficially pious. God has no interest in our deceiving ourselves; He is unimpressed by pedantry and appearances. Those who unconsciously consider themselves just because their external actions conform superficially to the rules have not even begun to open themselves up to the work that God wishes to accomplish in them. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, says St Paul. What is required here is not greater effort towards superficial perfection, but rather a greater, a finer contrition, a heart that has learned to break itself over even its smallest faults, because in the end, God calls us not merely to perfection so much as to the depths of union with Him; that we might be One with Him in the eternal communion of the Blessed Trinity. As we noted the other day, the ethics of Christianity are important, fundamental, but it is the ethos, the spirit, which runs to the very depths. That is why there is hope for the undeserving workers of the eleventh hour, and why not even the apparently meritorious workers of the first hour may presume on their superiority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Speaking of superiority, let us come finally to the second of the problems I mentioned above, for the Pharisees are blind in both eyes. Here, Jesus’ words may be the cause of some anxiety:

Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

While some see this verse as referring to the idea of a fixed predestination, others see the plant metaphor as a reference to those man-made doctrines that Jesus had just denounced – those growths on the Jewish religion that had nothing to do with the Law of God. Yet we may go in a slightly different direction. One lesson this line contains is the reminder that, as every gardener knows, not all those things that look like plants are indeed plants. The devil is the ludicrous ape of God but best appears as an angel of light, and his kingdom is a kingdom of imposture and deceit.

 One of the fundamental mistakes of the Pharisees, therefore, is the vice of self-deception, the sin of being impostors to themselves but it is by no means restricted to them. We may think of this as a kind of blindness that produces hallucinations! To be humble is not only to restrain our burgeoning vanity; it is also to challenge the little lies we tell ourselves, those dear but misleading ego-facing fantasies that blossom and bloom like weeds in the blink of our imagination’s eye. If, as St Thomas teaches, humility moderates an appetite for excellence, it must block most concretely the workings of the inner movie screen on which the spectacle of our wonderfulness appears to us. Here, we are often torn between what we think of ourselves, and what we consider others might think of us. When I am vain, when my deepest question and need are how I appear to the world, then I am who I think you think I am. When I am humble, in contrast, when my deepest question is how I stand before God in all my real misery and my potential glory, then I am not who I think you think I am. I am who God knows me to be, but with this difference: that only when I come to know who God knows me to be can I become who God calls me to be – to know God’s dream for me.  

Then, even if I am blind, rather than following other blind guides, I can sit beside the blind beggar Bartimaeus who is there on the dusty road in Jericho, crying out to the passing Lord: Son of David, have mercy on me!