From the archives: vocation, not self promotion

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection will be posted later.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 54-58) recounts an episode in which Jesus visits Nazareth and finds the population sceptical about His ministry. Where did this man get his wisdom and these mighty works? they wonder. Their questions come thick and fast, and before long the mood grows dark: They took offence at him. Jesus’ response to this precipitous judgement was philosophical but also practical. A prophet is not without honour except in his home town, He concluded, and He performed few miracles for them, the gospel says, because of their unbelief.

Sometimes, human beings are sunk simply by their own shortcomings. Here is Nazareth, the neediest of Israel’s villages, well known as a place of dishonour. And yet, instead of celebrating their local celebrity, the people were filled with scepticism at Jesus’ works. Was it not right to ask questions? Of course, it was. Was it not a normal requirement to discern well in such circumstances? Without a doubt. So, why did the Nazarenes go so wrong in the process?

The clue might be found in this gospel’s subtext, what lies beneath the surface. Where did this man get his wisdom? only appears to be a fair inquiry. Yet behind it is a kind of jealous attack. It is not Jesus’ wisdom that they were inquiring about. They were reacting instead to the very fact of it, like neighbours who react and say: have you seen what the Jones’s have done now? After that first question, therefore, every other inquiry was an attempt to demean the Messiah in their midst: Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? Yet again, we must read the subtext, the thing that lies beneath the surface: these questions were rhetorical, not genuinely interrogative. They were not about what they were about. They did not seek information. Rather, they sought to make the point that whatever Jesus had done, He was simply a local boy and didn’t deserve the acclaim. And there is the wayward human heart in a nutshell, souring like milk in the warm summer sun.

Jesus cannot heal us until we have fully recognised how broken we are, but we cannot fully recognise how broken we are when we are jealously comparing ourselves to others. The crowd’s questions almost amount to asking: why should we not be just as renowned as Jesus? Jealousy manifests itself in different ways; in the impious, it is simple, raw, and aggressive, as it is in this scene. In the pious, it might show itself through flattery or imitation or in an ill-disguised competitiveness for heavenly glory. But both categories of people are moved by the same force from within, the same instinct to want to show that they are as good as the one they are jealous of, or at least that those they are jealous of are no better than them. Perhaps it is because they do not know their own worth for only those who neglect their worth in God’s eyes look upon the qualities of others as a measure of their own failings.

But what is the measure of who we are, of what we are to become, and indeed of what we are worth? Are these things not determined by our vocation: our personal vocation, calling us to be our very own reflection of the goodness and beauty of our divine Creator, and our life’s vocation, calling us to some particular path of living? Instead of finding our guide in these two realities, we often allow who we are and what we are worth to be shaped by so many other forces in the human game of inauthenticity: by social pressures – the kind that the crowd try to exert in this gospel – or by covetous pursuit when we run towards not what God calls us to be but towards the thing that most seems attractive to us: wealth, fame, influence. Instead of vocation, we seem to aspire to self-promotion. But the truth is that we are least ourselves when we most wish to seem and to grab.

Nazareth of Our Lord’s day is the anti-culture of vocation: it is not interested in hearing God’s call, nor in honouring God’s call in others. To dwell spiritually in the Nazareth of England in the living holy house of the heart, proposes another way.

 

The limits of dialogue

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

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Today’s gospel (John 10: 22-30) takes place at the time of the Feast of Dedication, a solemnity marking the reconsecration of the Temple under Judas Maccabeus after its desecration. In this scene, He whose body is the Temple of Temples clashes with the children of Israel who question Him once more about whether He is the Christ. His reply disappoints them for He says He has already told them by word and by work. Then, returning to the theme of being a shepherd, He acclaims His Lordship over His sheep, His sheep’s recognition of Him, and His Father’s relationship to the flock. Lastly, He declares the mystery of mysteries that He and the Father are one.

On one level this scene is a clash of words and a dialogue of the deaf, at least on one side. Yet, it is important to remember something as we listen in to its beginnings: the first question about whether He is the Christ is a question in bad faith. Jesus, who sits and eats with sinners, who greets the woman at the well, and who speaks to Nicodemus in the night, follows in this scene the opposite strategy. At least, while He speaks and speaks abundantly, He does not enter a dialogue. Some today turn dialogue into a theological virtue; Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life, chooses here a totally contrary route. Is then Jesus the causer of the division?

Diplomats and peace brokers would tell us, yes, Jesus clearly here perpetuates division. Here, they would say, Jesus shows us His limits and His negativity. Here, they might conclude, Jesus shows us perhaps His death wish to become a martyr. Better to bring in the professional negotiators, the ones who know the honeyed words of concord and how to avoid division. Maybe Jesus can yet be saved from the cross – such a messy death. Or at least He could be stopped from urging His disciples to follow His example and do violence to themselves – remember His words about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes? For as all wise people know, those who do violence to themselves should probably be in an institution.

On another tack of course, as the Prime Minister of Israel recently told the world’s press, Unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan … if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Next time you meet any followers of Genghis Khan, do be sure to admit this to them. If Jesus wanted peace, He ought really to have come with His armies, and conquered all comers, crushing them, and adding it to His CV as He manifested Himself to the pinnacle of His career as the Messiah. There speaks the wisdom of this world, and the wisdom of Jesus’ interlocutors in today’s gospel.  

Here we are reminded again that all truths are paradoxical. God is Three and One; Mary is Mother and Virgin; the Eucharist is Sacrifice and Sacrament. And the truth that we must respect the consciences of others – as Jesus respected the consciences of His interlocutors – is paradoxically balanced by the truth that while erroneous consciences cannot be forced, they must be called out, if not in words, then in deeds. They must be called out firstly by being confronted by a contrary example. We cannot simulate concord; concord can only be crafted out of the bones of truth. Then erroneous consciences must be called out not by accusation – only Jesus may do that – but by simple witness, even perhaps the witness of silence. It may not be opportune to speak or to act but it is never opportune to dissimulate, not concerning the truths of salvation. When asked why he wrote his first book Under Satan’s Sun, a modern rehearsal of the life of a priest like St John Vianney, French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos replied: I wanted to bear witness before I died.  He wanted to speak truth into the immoral and nihilistic chaos of interwar France, following his master Jesus who speaks truth into the chaos of first-century Jerusalem, who speaks truth into the chaos of every one of us in our hearts. Let’s not let our consciences be deceived about how fragile our settlement with Him really is; how we need the living occupation of the Prince of Peace in our hearts for He came to make His home with us. Then and only then can we belong to the flock that He holds so that nobody may snatch it from Him, least of all the diplomats and the peacemakers.

How can this defensive negativity of Jesus do any good, wonders the wisdom of the world? You may well ask. How can the cross do any good? How could being born into obscurity do any good? How could choosing illiterate amateurs over professional scripture scholars do any good? How could allowing Himself to be delivered into the hands of His enemies do any good? How can the Prince of Peace stake a claim on peace by becoming the victim of the very violence He came to prevent? The answer to all these questions is simple and is found just two chapters later in St John’s gospel when Jesus communicates a message to the Greek gentiles who come to question Him:

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.

To which thought St Paul adds the following corollary:

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

If it is foolish, we can rest assured that the foolishness of God is greater than the wisdom of men.

Bearing with the hatred

 A recording of today's gospel (for the Solemnity of St George) and a reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 18-21) comes from the discourse of Jesus during the Last Supper. In it we hear Jesus again drawing out the paradox that no matter how we love the world and those around us – just as God so loved the world – we cannot expect that the world will reciprocate our affection. Indeed, it may be that we become objects of hate and abuse, victims of the persecutory spirit that has blown through the hearts and minds of men ever since Cain raised his hand in anger against his brother Abel. Yet, in all this, the disciple can take heart, for to suffer persecution in the name of Jesus is to become like Him, a persecuted emissary of the Father, an ambassador of the vineyard owner whose tenants have turned on their landlord. It is an old story and should not surprise us, although in our sweet naivety, we don’t see it coming. The servant is not greater than the Master, nor indeed will the tenants have the last say.

The very last line of this extract is in some ways its most striking: all these things they will do to you on account of my name because they do not know him who sent me. This is not merely true of our persecutors, however; it is true of us too. All our bad behaviour comes from this root: that we do not know the Father. We see this attested even within the Church, for we are all a mixture of good and bad, and as the Dominican Fr Clerissac says, to suffer for the Church, it may be necessary to suffer at the hands of the Church. Ignorance of the Father is a necessary condition that explains the waywardness of the persecutors, but it is not yet a sufficient explanation. For that, we must consider the other source of all our troubles: that we humans do not know ourselves; that the light of self-knowledge we grasped yesterday has dimmed and faded; that the posturing figments of our inner rich man block out the reality of our real poverty; that the uprightness we sensed in our last action seems missing from our next action. Like an old-fashioned analogue radio signal, our fidelity comes and goes, and we fail to appreciate the immense blessing of being called to stand as shorn and shivering lambs in the violent blasts of the world’s intemperate hostility.

In those moments, we need light from without and from within, and here Jesus offers us both. It is natural for us to wish to be in harmony with our neighbours or our fellow countrymen. We are social animals, even we hyper-individualists of the twenty-first century. Yet Jesus warns us clearly to prepare ourselves to be deprived of the consolations of that harmony and the warmth of fellow feeling: they will hate us, if we are true. At best, they will not understand us and grumble at our strangeness. Having entered into the service of God, we must prepare ourselves to do without.

But is this to our loss? We need to understand it is but a temporary situation. Our fellowship is now first with God, the source and foundation of our being and our calling, who calls us precisely into a unity distinct from the human herd, first with Himself, then with the other members of His mystical body, and only then with our fellow humans. God does not destroy human unity but reinvents it, re-creates it, in Himself.

When we die, says Thomas More to his friend the Duke of Norfolk, and you go to heaven for doing your conscience and I go to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me…for fellowship? In that scene in a Man for All Seasons, we hear crystallised the dilemmas of this passage from the gospel. The faithful disciple knows, tastes, bears the consequences of his or her choices, of the preferential option for God, of the burden that is Jesus’ cross, before knowing the surge of universe-defying energy and the life-restoring excesses of the Resurrection.

To restate St Athanasius’s words, therefore, all of us are called to become God, i.e. to become one with Him through a union of love; otherwise, we are condemned to choose a path of hate on which we fake our divine election like the devil, collapse inwards on our suppurating wound of self-centeredness, and turn thereby against the very neighbour we are meant to share an eternal destiny with beside the Lord.

Yet since we are not greater than our Master, the recourse He invokes is our recourse also: we can, like Him, call upon the name of the Lord, of the Father, and thus we will in the end be delivered from our enemies because we know the Father.

And having gone out to in sorrow, we will bring the harvest home with joy.

From the archives: a reflection on the true meat and drink of the Christian

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

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Today's gospel (John 6: 52-59) gives us more words of Christ upon the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jesus says these words in the synagogue at Capernaum, so in front of a very motley assortment of listeners. They are not words spoken in private but in the full glare of publicity.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, He says - undoubtedly to the astonishment of the audience.

He references the Jewish memory of the feeding of the people of God in the desert with manna. But He notes that they all died, whereas those that feed on His flesh will live forever.

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To cite again the words of Flannery O'Connor,

You will know the truth and the truth will make you strange.

Imagine the bewilderment of those who listened to this sermon of Jesus. Those who lived in Capernaum knew Jesus best of all, but surely with this one He had them flummoxed. Was this man who spoke so beautifully about God as the Father in heaven some kind of secret cannibal? Was He really just a pagan for who but the pagans consumed blood? We cannot get a sense of how these words were received without understanding the taboos that Jesus was breaking - not just human taboos but religious ones as well.

Men cannot take too much reality, says T.S. Eliot, and undoubtedly there is something very real in the need for pre-evangelization. And yet, as we see here, sometimes Jesus simply speaks the truth into the universe with full confidence, knowing that He is only the sower. The drama of redemption moves to its second act not with the preacher’s flattering words or diplomatic speech, but only when the heart of the listener recognises some responsibility that must be assumed. In other words, these shocking truths that we read in the gospel were accompanied by actual graces from the heart of Christ as they reached the hearts of the assembly. Those who preach the gospel cannot evaluate their effectiveness simply on the basis of how many people embrace their message. That is a far too human-centred view of evangelization. If we wish to speak of Christ to others, of His shocking doctrines, and if we wish others to hear, then our labour must be built on the foundation of prayer and sacrifice, as was that of Jesus. In the 19th century, two priests from England went to visit St John Marie Vianney, the famous and holy parish priest of the village of Ars, north of Lyons, to ask his advice:

We have preached and tried to spread the word, but nothing seems to work, they complained. What should we do?

Did you fast and do penance? the saint replied. Did you take the discipline? Did you sleep on the floor?

We do not know what these English priests did, but we do know that the parish priest of Ars is known the world over as the patron of pastors. The mistake of these priests was to think in purely worldly terms about the effectiveness of their preaching, and this is one of the observations that we can make today about this gospel. In purely human terms, the doctrine of the Eucharist is simply dropped on the heads of these listeners, so why should they believe it? While the words simply belong to the material universe that we occupy, the power that brings any soul to Christ belongs to God. The preacher might be better off spending fifteen minutes writing his sermon and forty-five minutes on his knees before the Tabernacle, just as Jesus’ sermons and parables stood upon a foundation of nights spent in prayer to the Father of all.

To imagine that the effectiveness of the preacher is related to what he says to the listener is, as I have said, a very human mistake - we should say a very worldly one. But those that have the same worldly spirit are the ones who struggle to understand what Jesus is saying in this gospel. Jesus proposes that they need to eat His flesh and drink His blood; it is only later that He will show the apostles how this is to be done. But in order to help His listeners, He also references the history of the Israelites wandering in the desert:

This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

How are we to understand this, since we have seen our loved ones receive communion at the altar before later watching their coffins standing before the sanctuary? Is this a promise of Jesus that has not been realised? To hear these words in such a way would again be far too worldly. When Jesus speaks of the death of the Israelites in the desert after eating manna, He does not mean their physical death but their spiritual death. Manna and quail fed their bodies, but they did not feed their souls. They nourished their bellies but not their hearts. And this too is crucial.

The grace of Christ, whether in the Eucharist or in any of the sacraments, or wherever it is encountered in the spiritual life, does not only elevate but heals. Its purpose is to cure us of the poison of sin. At the same time, in the gospel the symbol of feasting, of eating and drinking, is for those who are already on the journey of the Christian life or for those who have reached the end. The journey begins with death and resurrection. If a man collapses and has no heartbeat, the last thing he needs is a square meal. He probably needs defibrillation; he may need adrenaline. It wouldn't be kindness to heat up a tin of soup and pour it down his throat in the hope of bringing some warmth back into his increasingly blueish cheeks. It wouldn’t be Jesus’ way to preach to the man the peacefulness of a heart that never beats. Peace be to you, says the Risen Christ, but He says it with the smile of a conquer who came not to bring peace but the sword, who came to destroy the empire of sin.  

Jesus preached the Eucharist and shocked a religion horrified at the idea of consuming blood. To us He preaches the cross and we are horrified at the idea of abandoning our own desires. In both cases, Jesus alone remains the antidote to a poison that simply cannot be ignored.   

I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified, says St Paul to the Corinthians. For only the crucified Lord heals us of sin, and only the crucified Lord becomes the bread of life.

For, as we know, all other breads will perish.

A little light on the matter

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection is available here.

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In today’s gospel (John 3: 31-36), Jesus continues the conversation with Nicodemus which we have been listening to all week. It is not a long passage, and we need not delay long over the details. But it serves to bring out one of the themes that tend to be less evoked and which we have little inclination to reflect on: that the Light came into this world and the world received Him not.

These are words that haunted St John. They appear in any case in the opening of his gospel where the alignment of God, of His truth, and of the act of testimony, are made clear to the reader: the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

This clash of light and dark is not just a cosmic and global phenomenon, shaping our heavens and our horizons. Rather, it is the very story that unfolds in the life of every human, for again, as St John says: The true Light which enlightens every man was coming into the world.

Our God, the God from God and Light from Light, descends from His transcendent heights not to play with us, like some Greek divinity, but to live with us, to sup with us, converse with us like Nicodemus in the night, and to suffer and die along us, rising on the third day. This is how He enlightens us, and to those who receive Him, He gives the Spirit without measure. We do not reflect enough on this: the communication of the Spirit in such generosity, the riches that are ours at the price of opening our hearts to the Light.

But there is the other side of the drama too, a mystery of iniquity, that not everyone wills to receive this Light. We cannot presume on the state of anyone’s conscience, but we take too much our ease in believing that good will is universal, and everyone is good deep down. None are good in that simplistic sense; we are all a battlefield of good and evil, even the most sincere.

Mors et vita duello

Conflixere mirando.

Death and life are in a duel that astonishes us all, as the Sequence of Easter says. Salvation is not a walk in the park or a health spa for the rose-tinted optimists among us. Again, Jesus in today’s gospel:

Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on Him.

Triumph in this battle, however, does not come from our efforts. The weight is not on our shoulders, or it is but only insofar as we source all our strength and goodness in the one Saviour. And thus, the Easter Sequence, which echoes still in our hearts, concludes with the great Christian paradox:

Dux vitae mortuus

Regnat vivus.

The Leader of Life dies yet reigns and is alive.

A little touch of Jesus in the night

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

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Today’s gospel (John 3: 7-15) continues the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus in the night. They continue to speak of the Spirit of whom all must be born again, but who, as Jesus tells the Teacher of Israel, blows where He will. It is necessary for Jesus at this point to underline for Nicodemus his own ignorance, for despite all his great learning, the Pharisee cannot yet perceive the depth and the full truth of Jesus’ message. Yet in the end, as Jesus concludes, it will not be learning that brings salvation but the sight of, and belief in, the Son of Man, lifted up for all to see.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, presumably so as not to be observed. Yet the night in which he comes is our night also. The night has this double meaning: for on the one hand, we are blind and stumble about, unable to piece together the fragments of our understanding and the shards of our pain, while on the other hand, as the saying goes, the night brings counsel. The night brings the vision that the busyness and noise of the day obscure.

And still, that vision must come through a surrender to the Spirit who blows where He will. In the beginning the Spirit hovered over the still waters. But while He now hovers over the turbulent waters of our hearts, we cannot quite know His coming and His going, from where He blows and wither He is headed. What is this image for Jesus but a sign to Nicodemus that all His learning cannot contain God or indeed restrain Him? This is not an indication that God is arbitrary, a divinity that makes and breaks the rules of His own reality; God cannot make light darkness or darkness light. God does not call sin good or goodness evil. At the same time, as C. S. Lewis says of the lion Aslan, He is not a tame lion. We cannot relate to Him as to a mathematical formula that is lifeless; He is, as John Donne calls Him, a three-personed God. Donne’s poem, moreover, captures the difficulty of relating to Him, to Them, which comes not only from their not being a tame God of formulaic predictability but also from our own unsteady and unreliable hearts:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The blowing of the Spirit does not contradict our understanding of doctrine or dogma, but the words of the latter refer to mysteries whose depth and vitality are as yet unclear to us, and this to such an extent that the greatest mind of Christendom, St Thomas Aquinas, having had a vision of God, said in his dying hours that all he had written was as straw when compared to the reality of God. He might simply have said in that moment that the Spirit blows where He wills, and often what He wills is way beyond our ken.

How do we then listen for that Spirit, for His truth and for His call to us? How divine His movements? How consult Him in His unfathomable mystery? While we must allow Him not to be a tame Spirit, yet we have a compass point of sorts, some form of orientation even in this night. And we can find its rallying point where the beams of the cross intersect and hold up for all to see the Son of Man.

There, at the end of this gospel passage, Jesus evokes an event that is still hidden from Nicodemus, even though its truth – the truth of the healing power of one who is apparently the source of poison – was foreshadowed by Moses when he made the serpent of brass that healed the Israelites in the desert. For wherever the Spirit blows, He necessarily blows through the upright beam and spreading arms of the cross on which the Son hangs, like the wind blowing through the great arms of a windmill. Perhaps this is why Jesus says:

We speak of whom we know and bear witness to what we have seen.

Yet it is the Father whom They know, and to whom they bear witness. The Son, who will be raised up, and the Spirit, who blows where He wills, thus collaborate through the sending of the Son and the communication of the Spirit, to bring the life of the entire Blessed Trinity to those who are, like Nicodemus, lost in the night.  

 

Easter Recess

The COLW Blog is now in recess until Low Week. 

This week Christ is made obedient for us unto death, even death on the Cross. Next week, if we rise with Him, we must seek the things that are above where He sits at the right hand of the Father.

Many blessings upon all readers in this time of grace.

From the archives: a new song to the wonders of the Lord

Still celebrating the feast of yesterday, today the COLW Pilgrim Blog offers offers another reflection on yesterday's gospel from the archives. A recording of thereof can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) relates the central mystery of our charism in COLW – the Annunciation. What is announced is not only the coming of the Saviour, the Son of the Most High, not only His reign over the house of Jacob and His everlasting kingdom, but also the mysterious privileges that underpin the vocation of the Virgin Mary, paving the way for the restoration of the human race to its original course of friendship with God. Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you … Mary, you have found favour with God. God, who sees all time in one moment, anticipates in this one human creature the effects of the infinite merits of his Son and gives to her the extraordinary grace of conceiving a Son by whose grace she too has been saved. We all enjoy God’s gifts; this privilege was His to her. As she will soon proclaim to her cousin, her spirit thus rejoices in God her saviour. In Adam all have sinned; in Christ all have the possibility of redemption. But just as the original Adam’s fault was prepared by a woman, his companion Eve, so now the second Adam’s redemption is prepared by a reversal of Eve’s original disobedience in Mary’s fiat. This “yes”, she chooses freely in her sinless state, just as Eve freely chose sin in her sinless state; their sinlessness did not take away free their choice.

This, then, is the favour in which God the Father finds His daughter Mary: a state now of original harmony. And it is her harmony with Him which becomes the counterpoint for a new song to the Lord whose melody will be added by the Son she raises. When we pray in our turn that our lives may become a song of constant praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, all we do is add another line, another verse, to this existing harmony that begins through Jesus’ work in Mary’s soul at her conception. And as she was chosen by Him before the foundation of the world, so we too find ourselves beneficiaries of a similar election and, like her, find ourselves called to be holy and blameless, according to the purpose of His will.

Her mysteries are ours; from her immaculate conception comes in some sense our conception in grace. For there is no motherhood without begotten children, and in some way, her immaculate conception not only prepares her to bear God’s son - painlessly, say many Fathers of the Church - but to bear in a spiritual way His mystical body in the ugly labour pains of Calvary. For nothing will be impossible with God who reaps where He did not sow and gathers where He did not scatter and who, in the case of His Son, has already sent a herald ahead of Him, to prepare His ways and announce His coming, first in the previously barren womb of John's aged mother Elizabeth.

And now Mary does not begin her song but adds a new verse with the Father’s bass and foundation, the grace notes of the Holy Spirit, the melody of her Son from the depths of her womb, and her own haunting descant, learned in the holy solitude of her immaculate heart where she had long mediated on the favours of her maker:

Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.

There is no other key in which we can sing. Our new song is only a variation on the melody and harmony of Mary’s song, the theme tune of the Mystical Body in which reverberates the mercies of God in this world and in the next.

Glorious things are spoken of you, O Mary, for from you arose the sun of justice, Christ our God. We need no other song. This is the new song, God’s redeemed composition, its instruments chosen, its harmonies grounded in love and mercy, its verses unfolding in the lives of those who echoes Mary’s fiat; its climax the singing of the same mercies in a grand choral and orchestral tutti, the perpetuum mobile of the eternal chorus.

 

Going to the heights

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

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Today’s gospel (John 8: 21-30) sees Jesus in teaching mode but now with the Jewish crowd at the forefront of whom were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. At this point, there are no parables for them; only mysteries, riddles even. Where I am going you cannot come…You are of this world; I am not of this world…he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him. Rabbinical disputation was a refined art, but this was of another order all together. Jesus could play that game and played it sometimes to shut up the Pharisees, such as when He asked them where the baptism of John came from. But here we simply find mystery upon mystery, and all of it falls on deaf ears:

And the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Indeed, just before today’s extract, Jesus had declared Himself the light of the world.

The light of the world! It has a soft, even a whimsical sound to it. We like it since we find it comforting. Yet if we thought carefully about it, we would realise what it implies: that the world without Jesus is deprived of light; that all the supposed enlightenment of self-admiring humanity is but a feeble flicker of a flame in comparison to His ardent fire; that there is darkness not only around us but also within us, and that without His help, that darkness will overcome us.

Where then is our healing, where our enlightenment, where our salvation? Jesus in this extract declares where we need to look.

When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He.

These are words that recall the nighttime meeting with Nicodemus, and the message Jesus shared then is worth recalling now. He is evoking a moment in the history of Israel when so many Israelites were being bitten by a poisonous snake, and Moses had to craft a serpent of brass and place it on the crotch of a tree. Then, all those who looked at this artistic but harmless figure of the evil serpent were cured of the poison.

These parallels between the history of Israel and Jesus' life are the poetry of God in which happenstance and circumstance, at least to our eyes, are woven into the song of His love that calls us back to Him: I stress here the word call. Hearing our vocation is the beginning of our answer to the poetry of God’s saving invitation. We too have been attacked by a serpent and are suffering from the poison that this has left in our system. It renders us ignorant, ill willed, weak, and self-indulgent, wounded in our minds, our wills, and in our lower appetites. These are the blemishes in our nature which only the grace of God can heal. In fact, one of the distinctions that identifies the effects of God's grace in sinners is between gratia sanans - healing grace – and gratia elevans - grace that raises us up. God’s grace does both, curing our ills and bringing us to a place no purely human power could reach.

                In this gospel we are also given to understand another reason why we too must be raised up. For if we are members of the mystical body of Christ, then we too must be raised up on the cross in order to share in the eternal life of the blessed Trinity: where the Master is, there must the disciple also be. In the cross there is also a sign of the expansive love of God who wills to bring us into His very heart. Just as we stretch out our arms in order to embrace those we love, so God - who loves the world and sends His Son to save it - stretches out His arms in the crucifixion of that Son, casting the mighty from their thrones and raising up the lowly anawim, His servants.

                We face here one of the many paradoxes, one of the apparent contradictions, which are part of God's poetry also. As Saint Paul tells us, this cross, an instrument of torture, pain, and despair, is a scandal to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. For the people of Israel, it represents the apparent abasement of the God Most High, and for everyone else, it represents yet another example of human stupidity. But the folly of God is greater than the wisdom of men, and the greatness of His folly would rescue us unworthy ones from a condemnation that we have only too often deserved. Thus, the great hymn Crux Fidelis captures this mad poetry of God's love on Good Friday:

 

Sweet the nails, and sweet the wood,

Laden with so sweet a load!

 

When we listen to the cross, we hear the call of His love to rise above the misery of our current condition. And from the heights of the cross – the exaltation of the Cross literally means ‘from the heights’ ex altis – we can see into the distant country of our eternal home.

 

But, only from its heights...

 

The original follower of Jesus

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 2: 41-51) recounts the episode of the finding in the Temple. After the Passover visit to Jerusalem, the twelve year-old Jesus stays in Jerusalem while his parents travel back to Nazareth. Realising He is not with either of them, Mary and Joseph rush back to the city to search for Him, a task that covers three days of utter anguish for them. They finally find Him asking questions in the Temple and amazing those who heard His questions and His own answers. Rebuked by Joseph and Mary, Jesus returns with them to a life of submission and obedience in His own hometown.

This gospel marks the feast of St Joseph, and we will come to him shortly. Yet in passing, let us wonder who could have heard Jesus speak during this episode twenty years before His public ministry. Was Nicodemus there? Does the gospel record without our knowing it the first stirrings of Nicodemus’s vocation when he perhaps shared the amazement of Jesus’ listeners? Did a different, ambitious man, a Sadducee named Caiaphas, look on and long to be the centre of attention like this young Nazarene upstart? Who knows whose paths intersect with this scene that is pregnant with meaning for the Old Testament and the New?

Yet amid the tumult of these three days, we find the fleeting figure of a father fraught with anxiety, accompanied by his even more distressed wife, both looking desperately for signs that their child was still alive and still here somehow in a capital city from where strangers from all around the Mediterranean World were departing again for their distant homelands. Apart from the usual fleshpots and dens of sin where Jesus might have been detained, who know what ghastly fears crossed the minds of Mary and Joseph as they watched the foreigners leaving, accompanied perhaps by retinues of young slaves? How could their lovely boy have disappeared? Surely, He was taken against His will? And how the three days, one by one, must have ground that niggling anxiety to a sharpened, gleaming sword of sorrow!

Yet, we may wonder if Joseph’s anxiety was different from Mary’s, and not only because he was a man, and men worry differently. Mary’s soul was full of grace at all times. Yet because of this, we see in this moment that the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit cannot signify that God moves them constantly into action. In these three days, Mary lives by the theological virtue of faith, a faith unsupported by human emotion or the connatural stirrings of affection that the Paraclete’s gifts share with us, a faith that knows the greatness and goodness of God, but also that He can sometimes permit the most terrible things to happen. Perhaps for Mary, the anxiety lay in not knowing which explanation applied to Jesus’ absence. There was no human accounting for it; only a gulf, an absence, a vacuum, where normally there was union, presence, and a silent fullness in her soul.

Joseph’s experience was likely very different. By tradition a man without personal sin, he was not preserved from the wounds of original sin, and how these wounds must have bitten deeply in the three days of searching. What thoughts of self-doubt that tortured his mind with the help of demonic profiteers: Joseph the prudent become Joseph the fool who lost the Son of God; Joseph the strong rendered Joseph the weak by failing to do his duty towards his Son; Joseph the obedient rendered a rebel by his lack of attention. Did Joseph go to bed fitful each night, hoping against hope that another dream would visit him? Was the third morning worse than the others, precisely because no dream had come now for two nights? Did he fear punishment because, like Eli who failed to restrain his sons, he, Joseph, had failed to care for His?

All we know in the end is that St Joseph survived these three days, and that Jesus was submissive to His authority from that moment forward. Yet surely, in this moment, Joseph proved himself attentive to the Father’s forming action. What was the Father teaching St Joseph in these days of chaos and crisis if not that his own role was only for a time? Joseph had a job to do, but it did not exhaust who he was. Joseph had responsibilities but these did not define his life entirely. At all times, Joseph’s experience was one of the need for utter dependence on the provision of God, communicated to him often through angelic messengers. This experience must then have driven him forward in that calling that lay within his exterior calling as the foster father of Jesus. In the end, God gave Joseph a job only because He wanted Joseph for His own, granting him a role in that work of salvation.

What are any of us called to when the circumstances escape our capacities, other than to offer ourselves again to the loving kindness of the heart of our God who has all things in His care? How deep the space that these days of apparent separation must have carved in the heart of this just man! Yet in this, he is our model and example, like his spouse Mary whose own experience of these days we may reflect on another time. Mary, our mother and our model, is yet different from us in a way that we cannot comprehend, due to her unwounded human nature. Yet Joseph is like us, a man born in sin, a hero of silent fidelity, of union with God’s purposes, of obedience despite the cravings of his lower nature.

Next in the gospel come the middle, hidden years when Jesus becomes an adult man, and who does He choose to learn under but this humble carpenter from a despised Galilean town? God achieved many purposes in these events; the refining of Joseph’s soul for the road ahead was not the least of them. For in teaching him that he was not the master of his destiny, that nothing but the deepest reliance on God would do, the Heavenly Father taught Jesus’ earthly father to be a follower of Jesus before there was even such a thing.