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!

 

On counting the cost

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 14: 25-33) sees Jesus turning to a large crowd and speaking to them some home truths. What must they have thought, these enthusiasts who followed after Him? For Jesus does not want enthusiasm; He wants fidelity, a completely different thing. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. These are not comforting words, no more than the words He had said first of all:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

 Thus, it would appear, Jesus expects them all to count the cost carefully before they follow Him. For in the rest of this gospel extract, he asks a series of rhetorical questions about those who begin a thing but cannot finish it. And what is that cost? Jesus answers with a rhetorical finish:

Therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

This gospel takes us back to another scene in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus promised His disciples that they would be hated even by members of their own family because of their allegiance to Him. This time the cards are turned. Jesus tells his disciples flatly that they must hate all those nearest to them, otherwise, they cannot be His disciples. Here, as so often in the gospel, Jesus is in full hyperbolic mode and not for one instant does He mean that we must disobey the greatest commandment to love God and to love our neighbour; not for one instant does He demand that we do anything so unnatural as to break the fourth commandment to honour our mother and father; never is it in His plan that we should be perverse enough to detest our own flesh and blood.

What Jesus means here is to remind His disciples of His call to the two detachments without which we cannot embrace the one great love of our lives. For what is it to hate our mother and father or our wife and children other than to be detached from them in the deepest Christian sense of this word? Not to be detached in some unemotional way, but not to be so attached as to put them before God. Should we renounce our faith to save the life of a child? A secular pragmatist would say: absolutely. The son of God would say: those who try to save their lives in this world lose them in the next. This is why not even therapeutic abortion is possible. Does Jesus know what He is asking when He places this demand on us? Undoubtedly, yes, for He knows all things. He knows that our nearest and dearest are not simply close to our hearts; they live in our minds and dwell in our bones and bowels. If we love them, our hearts leap up to behold their smile, and our tears run freely at their grief. Hence, Jesus’ teaching in this gospel: He knows how much we are attached to those we love, for so was He attached to those He loved; to Mary and Joseph, to Martha, Mary and Lazarus. And yet, love of God came first, for He is the Lord our God above all things and Him only must we serve. No greater love is there than this that we lay down our lives for those we love, which we do even when we love God more than them.

Friendship runs as deep in me as it does in you, I think, Norfolk, but only God is love right through

says Thomas More to the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons.

But then comes that second detachment, not now from others but from ourselves. And this detachment is much more difficult, requiring a deeper renunciation; it cuts through our very flesh and bone to reach the centre of our nervous systems. At the edges, this detachment requires our separation from the desires of this world, with all its riches and advantages. But thereafter, how much deeper a renunciation must take hold, a renunciation which requires our dethronement, the dethronement of our selfish wounded hearts, and the enthronement of the loving heart of God within the depths of our being. This is the meaning of incarnational when we speak of the charism of COLW. For this detachment from our very selves enables us to say with Saint Paul:

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

How can we count the cost of this detachment from self? It is not just about the outward senses but also about the inward senses down to our most instinctive and autonomic levels. Our sense of safety, our sense of security, our sense of being and belonging: our very sense of self must be subsumed into the torrent of His eternal love:

That they may be one, Father, as you and I are one.

For our transformation into Christ in our very selves brings with it the mystery of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity, so that even the individual Christian, the lowly disciple of the Lord, the anawim, in their interior life reflects the interior life of the Incarnate God when He walked on earth within whose human soul was found the vision of the Blessed Trinity.

For all Jesus’ rhetoric in today's gospel, few of us have really counted the cost, and fewer still have paid it. If we had, we would already have set the world on fire. But this is our duty now. This is our calling; the universal call to holiness has gone out. And the carrying of the cross which Jesus calls us to today, the fiat in sorrow that we must offer as we offer the fiat in joy, is only the messy side of the tapestry on the other side of which is the extraordinary prospect of the God of Eternal Beauty who poured himself out so that we might share in His Eternal love.

Martha’s mistake

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 38-42) offers us the famous scene in which we learn practically nothing of the teaching Jesus delivered! Instead, we hear the story of a harried woman run off her feet, feeling like she is the butt of everyone’s whims and like she has been let down by her supposedly lazy sibling. We do hear one lesson from the Lord, however: that Mary, Martha’s sibling, has chosen the better part and will not have it taken from her.

We know Martha learned deeply from this experience. We know this for when later came the grief of her brother’s death, it was she who had the composure to talk to Jesus first of all. She had seen by then the one thing necessary: the call to be in the presence of the Lord with all that that implied.

Martha was so hurried and so busy in her own house. But the question is: what was she seeking? Ostensibly, she sought the comfort and the refreshment of her guests. Martha was perhaps what some people call a “feeder”, one whose love language could be expressed in the care and the craft of the kitchen and in the triumphantly flourished plate of culinary dainties. But there was only one thing necessary.

Martha was so intent on this agenda of her own creation that it led her into mindreading. How do we know? Listen again carefully to the words she addresses to Jesus:

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?

Lord, do you not care? Thus do we all try to mindread the Mind of the Eternal One. It is not just that Mary is not helping; it is not even that Jesus has not yet spoken to correct Mary’s misbehaviour. Martha has gone one step further and read into Jesus’ failure to act an indifference that piques her annoyance. Lord, do you not care…?

Martha’s first sin may have been vanity in seeking the approval of her guests, or it may even have been resentment at judging her sister’s inaction. But where does it lead if not to the hopeless, the futile, the sterile attempt to squeeze the living God into the space and scope of her own desires and expectations? Lord, do you not care…? Martha, Jesus might have replied, do you not think?

Yet Jesus answers this question not by contradicting her assumption but by holding up a mirror to her soul: by showing her that what lay behind her actions was not care but carelessness. We have come to think of anxiety only as a psychological condition; but here we see that it may also have a moral root in a lack of purity of intention, an almost wilful lack of peace, in a failure to encounter the burdens of the day in a spirit of service: not where can I do good but where do I best please the Lord? There is all the difference here between the ethics of Christianity and its ethos. It is not really possible to do good (small g) unless in doing so we are seeking the Good (capital G); every other action falls in some way short of our calling.

Yet, Martha is not attentive to these things, for her own drives have gone unexamined. She has not learned to question her apparent diligence; her pride will not permit it. She has not learned to take a step back and remember that, whatever the day brings, God has a plan; that God plants an angel chorus at every turn of our day to cheer us on, if only we will learn to open our hearts to their song of perpetual adoration to the glorious Trinity.

Martha was rebuking the Lord for failing to sink to her level, to shrink His expectations until they were as petty as hers, until they sought her satisfaction. In return, Jesus gently rebuked her for failing to rise to His expectations, for not reflecting His largesse, or for not seeking above all merely to please the Lord, her God. This is the one thing necessary, the upper room, the heights of Tabor, the crux of the Cross before Jerusalem, from which transcendent place we are called to cast our blind eyes upon the world and receive His sight: the grace to rest our eyes on the Heart of the One, and the grace to see all things and people as He sees them.

Martha dictated to Jesus: Tell her then to help me. How often we dictate to Jesus, sometimes in bold statements, and sometimes by passive-aggressive non-cooperation! And yet Jesus offers no counter command in this instant. Rather, He instructs her heart by pointing out the value of what Mary had done, the value of the path that Martha had not yet found.

It was not that Mary was lazy, although we can imagine that when this exchange was over, she offered to take her sister’s role while she, Martha, sat at the Lord’s feet herself:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

But there, in the final analysis, as Martha had to learn, is where all true action for God’s kingdom must begin and end: not in schemes and plans, not in busyness and not-enough-time-for-youism, not in initiatives and campaigns, not in mission statements, committee meetings, or any of the hideous metaphors that assault us with their pious idealisation of building an ecclesial paradise on earth; but in a quiet yet fierce loyalty to the one thing necessary, to that command of the Lord that whispers still through the olive groves of Gethsemane: watch and pray. For only out of that mighty stillness comes the triumphant assault of the Lord on the Cross and on the Tomb.

  

 

Consider the birds of the air

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) takes us back to the parable of the sower that that we heard two Sundays ago, a story that contains several chapters within it, all full of llessons for our spiritual lives. Jesus in this passage explains one level of meaning that is embedded in the parable. The first seed falls on ground - our souls - from where it is instantly snatched away by the devil. That seed will simply never take root. The next seed does indeed take root, but the soil is rocky and unforgiving, and the shoots of new life - the new aspirations and desires of grace - cannot stand the tribulation that comes and so wither away. All that humble promise that arose when new life began is then lost in a few instants.

 The next seed takes root and grows well, even perhaps grows strongly, but there is a counter force in play now, an overgrowth of brambles - the attachments and lures of this world - that hold back the new life, and it is choked accordingly. The field becomes a battle ground and the life sprung from the seed yields before the enemy. Then, at last, some seed falls on good ground where no bird robs it, the roots can go deep,  and no bramble hinders its growth. And, granted the sun of God’s joy and the rain of His grace, it springs forth and bears fruit in varying amounts.

Of course, this parable can be read as a lesson in how it is that some embrace the work of the Divine Sower and some do not. Like so many of the parables, it contains a lesson against the fantasies that some have had - and indeed revive  nowadays - for universal salvation. The awful opposite of that prospect is only another mystery that attends the freedom of the soul which not even God will transgress. Its counterbalance is of course the superabundant generosity of the Divine Sower who casts His seed with such abandon and confidence. Though three quarters of these seeds seem to be wasted, we can leave the harvest to the wisdom of God who knows all things and foresees all ends.

And yet in other ways, this parable is not merely about the drama of salvation and damnation, but also a set of lessons for those who are trying -  -as much as they can to be the fourth kind of soil that receives the seed. We wish to be that soil in which the seed springs up and brings forth fruit. But this bringing forth and the ongoing health of these plants are not the work of a moment only, of some fundamental choice at one point in time. A white fence post, says Chesterton, to remain a white fence post must be regularly painted. A well-tended garden to remain a well-tended garden must be thus tended regularly. And so it is that unless our soil is well tended and carefully watched over, it risks impoverishment, invasion, sterility, and fruitlessness. These are the chapters within this greater story of the work of the Divine Sower. For reasons of space and time, however, we will focus now only on the first of these challenges: the challenge of the birds.

What then are the birds of the air, the devils who come and steal the seed away from our souls? It is easy perhaps to spot the obvious ones, but the devil often appears as an angel of light. Deceit and deception are his modus operandi. We may feel we have done enough for our spiritual lives by removing or judiciously limiting distractions such as the television, the radio, or the mobile phone. Certainly, their unbridled use is not compatible with a commitment to the following of Christ, for our souls were not made to be the highways and byways of every thought and desire that the world broadcasts for our consumption.

But then, we forget that the original medium on which meaning is imprinted is our very souls. Anima est quodammodo omnia, says St Thomas: the soul is in some ways all things, for this is how it understands.  When those thieving birds from outside are identified, excluded or restricted, the battle is not yet won, for within our souls there are already many thieving birds: distractions, our inner voices and ponderings, our memories and fantasies, and all those internal forces that give echo to our past wounds, our present struggles, and our future desires. It is not only the demoniac among the tombs who has a legion within him; we all do to some degree.

***

So, how do we make peace? How do we bring about order on the streets of our minds and in the garden of our souls? We blame our internal busyness on a lack of time and space, but if we lack these things, then we must make them. Time and space cannot be multiplied outside of us, but in our hearts they are the fruit of stillness, and stillness only takes a little time and space; only the time and space needed to relax our grip ;to let go and let God, as the saying goes.

Indeed, this exclusion of the birds that steal the seed should be not so much Operation Scarecrow, as Operation Birdman. Many birds must of course be excluded but many others need to be charmed and tamed, purified of their power of distraction, so they can contribute to the life of the field, rather than ruining it. Of course, many thieving birds in us are the fruit of illicit desires, and given the wounds of original sin, there is no surprise in that. And yet other thieving birds come from wounds untended, from corners of our lives where there were historic disasters that have never been properly healed, and that have left a burden and a distortion that we are so accustomed to, we hardly know the difference between them and ourselves.

If your eye offends you, pluck it out, says the Lord, and we can do this with the thieving birds that come to us from outside. But we cannot lose our minds to save ourselves. To be delivered so that the seeds of the Sower can grow freely, we need deep inner work, a disposition to undertake it on our side, and a willingness to let it be done unto us, under the hand of the Vine Grower who wishes us to bring forth fruit; pruned, yes, of all that is superfluous, but purified also in all those distended and distorted parts of our souls where the world, the flesh, the devil, or merely the difficult circumstances of our lives, have led us astray.

This is not the end of God’s work in us. It is not even the beginning of the end. Yet it might be the end of the beginning, a work of gentle, judicious wisdom, rather than sadistic self-persecution. We are always in the gentle hands of God, although we do not always recognise them.

To understand this from one last angle, we can reflect on a terrible moment in Chinese history - let us call it a counter-parable - the episode of the Chinese communist campaign against what they called the four pests. According to their propaganda, rats, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows, held back the great crop potential of the Chinese fields in the 1950s, and so the Communist Party launched a campaign whose spearhead was the fight against the sparrows. They were targeted by hunters, stoned by little boys and women in the fields, collected in great stinking bags of rotting corpses, and brought for a meagre bounty to the local Party headquarters. They soon learned the folly of this policy, however, as the crops failed because of the insect population which had been previously kept back by the birds. The mismanagement of this situation contributed to the greatest famine in world history and the deaths of around 50 million people. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

The thieving birds of the air must of course be fought back; but every well-tended garden needs some semi-tame ones also, who are part of its ecology, can serve its purposes, who have their place and even their own charm, and who, properly considered, may even bring a certain beauty to the place. They only thieve the seed of the Sower because they need taming, but when they are tamed, and when we hear their music, we will realise why St Augustine said: cantare amantis est: only the lover sings.

Mary, last and first

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 46-50) is brief but its meaning runs deep. The Mother of God and some of Jesus’ wider family are seeking to speak to Jesus, and Jesus seems to respond with a rather detached, almost disrespectful remark: those who do the will of my Father in heaven are my brother, sister, and mother.

No doubt today’s gospel is meat and drink to those who prefer to see Mary as a kind of holy “girl next door”, a folksy mother earth figure with a swish of hippie non-judgmentalism about her. It is the kind of image of Mary that is calculated not to frighten. And yet, as maternal as she is, we do Mary wrong if we do not recall that the Roman liturgy once evoked her in the terms used in the Song of Songs:

Who is this that looks forth like the dawn,

    fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

And why should the Mother of God not be so evoked, she who is also Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs, Queen of Confessors?

So, why does Jesus respond as He does in today’s gospel, in a manner that might almost suggest He no more believes in family bonds than one of Mao’s Red Guards? Here we see that the last or the least is the first in the kingdom, and that those who are humbled will be exalted.

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First, we probably should see His response in the context of its time in Israel. In a society where family ties and tribal identity are everything, Jesus is launching a gospel of spiritual kinship that transcends all earthly belongings. One can imagine the way in which perhaps well-meaning persons might have announced the coming of His mother, implying that Jesus had to drop everything and run outside. In this context, His words are no disrespect to His Mother but a reminder of the foundation of the kinship of grace that underpins all the work of the New Covenant in His blood.

But we can also take these words in another sense: that because of her election by God, she became His mother and did the will of the Father by what we call a prevenient grace. The destiny of Mary lies in the coming together of her predestination in grace from the heart of the Trinity and her free cooperation with that call when it came. Here we stand at the centre of that mystery which is her fiat, her free consent to God’s plans, the transformation of her life that makes her the beachhead of a divine and gentle invasion of the world to liberate us all from the chains of sin. This is why the liturgy in the Middle Ages looked on her as that figure in the Song of Songs

fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array.

It is not that she is a power in and of herself. Rather, by her free cooperation with God, by her resolve to do the will of the Father in heaven, she initiates this return to God through the grace and redemption of her Son because God had first loved her. She achieves in that moment a status that is the reverse of our unhappy mother Eve, becoming a second Eve to the redeeming second Adam. What enables her to fulfil this role is her availability and openness to God, sustained by her virtues of obedience and humility, and crowned by her thankfulness and joy, especially the joy of the Annunciation:

First of my joys – their foundation and origin,

Root of mankind’s gracious redemption,

as the Pinsent Ballad says.

What is so reassuring about this is that Mary’s joy is not hers exclusively but becomes available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, as she did. Mary’s joy that led her to accompany Christ to Calvary was not hers exclusively but is also available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, bearing their cross after Jesus. She goes ahead, our Queen and our Mother, the cause of our joy, because she is gifted to us as such from the cross by our Redeemer.

Jesus is no lonely Greek hero, a figure of egoistic self-glorification. By making us fellow children and heirs with Him, He calls us – and Mary first of all – to make up in our selves that portion of redemption that is still unfulfilled. In other words, Mary could have said these words even before St Paul wrote them:

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. (Col 1: 24)

Can anything be lacking in Christ’s sufferings? Yes, our free cooperation with His battle campaign, our free shouldering of the burden of redemption, which makes up for what is lacking in His not because our effort is worthy purely in and of itself, but because His grace is meant to transform our least act of good will into a weapon of His love, conquering not only our own hearts but the hearts of all those belonging to His mystical body.

The very heart of our restoration in grace, of our spiritual lives, and our path back to the Father, is traced out for us in the likeness that Christ establishes in our souls. We are Sons and Daughters of the Father with and through Him, and Mary was so before us all; we are priests, prophets and kings with and through Him, and Mary was so first of all; we collaborate in our redemption and the redemption of others with and through Him, and Mary did so first of all; Mary the faithful one, Mary who said the first yes of the new dawn of redemption.

And this is why in COLW she is our model: a model of availability, openness, and teachability; a model of collaborating in redemption for the sake of His body the Church; a model even of our sorrows on earth, and please God, of our eternal joys. 

In bread we trust

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 1-8) shows us a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees who spot the disciples plucking and eating ears of corn on the Sabbath. Jesus answers their objections by citing the case of King David who ate the Bread of the Presence reserved for the priests. He refers also to the case of Temple priests who were held innocent while profaning the Sabbath by their work. The logic of these suspensions of the law, conceded by the Pharisees, is meant to cast a light on their hypocrisy by which they sought to entrap Jesus. More than that, of course, as He concludes: The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.

This gospel is usually approached from the perspective of Jesus’ teaching on epikeia, the jurisprudential principle that enables us to avoid legal literalism by honouring the intentions of the law giver. If my neighbour’s house is burning down, epikeia would allow me to try to get inside to save him, even though on other days of the week, doing that would make me a burglar; the lower law of private property cedes to the higher law of preserving life. It is not that Jesus is a law-destroying revolutionary, but rather that He situates lower laws in the context of higher ones.

But today, let us approach this extract from the gospel of St Matthew by dwelling on the Bread of Presence that David ate. The Bread of Presence consisted of twelve loaves to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, which sat on a golden table inside the Holy Place (not the Holy of Holies), alongside the menorah and the altar of incense. They symbolised God’s care for the twelve tribes and His covenant with them, and at the end of each week they were replaced with new loaves while the priests consumed the old ones. The spiritual significance of each of these details is almost overwhelming.

For first of all, they were bread, that ancient symbol of life, conviviality, and the fruit of labour. Bread tells a human story in its own terms, from the fact it is still made from crushing many individual grains so that they can become one flour, one dough, to the historical accident that bread was once baked in common ovens, as it still is today in poorer parts of the world where families do not have their own stoves. Conviviality means living together in shared joy. Every culture worthy of itself generates such conviviality spontaneously. It is a sign of the morbidity of our contemporary culture that so many of our communities are dead in this regard, for our relations are now almost purely economic, transactional, and the word “community”, a term long honoured more in the breach than the observance, is trotted out only as a comforting lie to cover up the nakedness of our widespread coldness and indifference. Our culture’s departure from this story of bread is a sign there is something humanly awry.

Yet, bread also tells a part of the story of God’s action in the world, from the manna of the desert to the House of Bread – Bethlehem – from where David, the sacred loaf eater himself came, and where Jesus, the Bread of Life, was born. Like Jesus who crafted miracles sometimes literally out of the earth, God speaks to us in all these symbols through which His care for His people is revealed. When Jesus performed His first miracle in Cana, He did not create a public spectacle but, behind the scenes and under the very noses of His hosts and the wedding guests, He saw to their needs, and spared them embarrassment and disappointment, all the while finding in these events a sign of His hour still to come. The Bread of Presence then found itself paralleled again in the feeding of the five thousand where, when the multiplied loaves had done their job, there were still fragments left over to be gathered up (and no doubt later eaten) by those who would become priests of the New Testament. Funny the gospel writers never say what happened to the gathered fragments, but wasn’t it obvious? They were probably shared by the disciples and among the poor over the following days.

The Bread of the Presence, however, symbolised something more profound about the choices Israel made in coming into the obedience of God. The twelve loaves were part of the liturgy of the Temple, an honoured symbol kept in the Holy Place. And thus, they cast in a new light those words of Jesus:

My bread is to do the will of Him who sent me.

The material, physical loaves of the Holy Place had to be replaced with an offering that would not need replacing at the end of the week. When Jesus came, this Bread of Presence, was replaced forever by the bread of His obedience to the Father. Divine obedience is for life, not just for Christmas. Thus, the new bread of the Holy Place is the fiat that Jesus makes to the will of the Father: a fiat at times in joy and a fiat at times in sorrow. When we consume the Bread of Life, we are saying literally that we wish also to eat that bread of obedience to the will of the Father.

This then is the bread that gives life, the bread of eternal conviviality – behold, I come to do your will - not to be confused with the bread that perishes that Jesus denounces in the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel. This bread, which is one with the leavened hypocrisy of the Pharisees, is the bread of self-pursuit, a loaf that is not for sharing, the bread that only resembles bread, like the plasticated loaves we find on the shelves of most supermarkets in our dead towns. And yet, tragedy of tragedies, how we have a taste for such impostor bread, how it pleases our palette even as it rots our gut, the inner self that can only be fed by the bread of the will of the Father.

The lower laws must cede to the higher ones. The law of the Temple ritual ceded to the law preserving David’s life. But since there is a more perfect Temple in the body of the Jesus, the law of sin and wilfulness in our bodies must now cede to the higher law according to which we must choose this new bread, the bread of the Father’s will, the bread of a new Presence by which He is present to us and we through Him are present to each other in His name. Conviviality.

Lord, restore our hunger; revive our appetites that have gorged on the fake bread of disobedience, so that our hearts, like David’s, might sing to you with the new conviviality of the Bread of Life.

From the archives: the humble servant

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 8-12) again presents us with a set of aphorisms of the Lord. You are not to be called rabbi, says the rabbi to His disciples. Neither be called instructor, says the instructor of all. And finally comes the greatest of His warnings in this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

As so often in the gospel, the Lord is here in paradoxical mode. Thus, He often says things that are apparently contradictory, but which express a truth not immediately obvious to our earthly minds. The particular form of paradox in today’s passage is hyperbole, a truth expressed via exaggeration. So, Jesus says call nobody your Father? Did He thus forbid us to call our own fathers “Dad” or our priests “Father”? Not at all. Certainly, St Paul did not think so, for it is he who points out to the Ephesians that all paternity in heaven and earth is named after the Father. So, what does the Lord mean by saying: Call no one Father? Simply, that we should make nobody but the Lord our God our ultimate father, or rabbi, or instructor. We should, in other words, have no strange gods before Him: the god of material or existential security, the god of worldly adulation, the god of fashionable opinion, the god of a self-serving anxiety whose direction we secretly seek after more than we attend to the word of the Lord. How many things do we unwittingly make our “Father” by interiorising their diktats, rather than trusting humbly in the Lord on whom we are meant to cast our every care?

Then comes the final paradox of this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. These words are mysterious indeed, for they are not to be understood only as an observation on the fate of human decision making. Taken in their moral sense, of course the first part tells us more or less that pride comes before a fall. But what about the second part: whoever humbles himself will be exalted? In another way, these words have not a moral sense but we might say a Christological sense, telling us intimately about our Saviour and His mode of dealing with us:

The greatest among you will be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Now, the words have not so much a moral sense as a historical one, for they evoke the history of our creation, our fall, and our salvation. From the beginning, the Lord was the servant of all, for it was by His labour that we were, and are, constantly brought into being. Was this labour? According to Scripture, so much was it labour that the Lord rested from it on the seventh day. Of course, we know this expression is a human one adapted to our understanding, for God is ever the same and, being pure spirit, does not suffer weariness. It was, therefore, this Servant who, when our first parents exalted themselves and brought themselves down in a humiliating ruin, humbled Himself even more than in his creative labours, poured Himself out in the incarnation, and came to save us. For which reason, again St Paul tells us, He has been given a name which is above all others.

We are reminded again here of the Lord’s call to follow Him. This is not only a following in a moral sense, but also in the sense of how we orient our inner selves. Like Him, we are called to share our very selves, and it is impossible for anybody wrapped in self-exaltation to share themselves in this way. We must, says French philosopher Gustave Thibon, either become like God through our adoration and love, or else we will find ourselves becoming false imitators of our maker; why else did the devil tempt our first parents by promising that they would be like gods?

For us, then, there remains the question of undertaking the great task expressed so often in the invitatory of the office of Matins:

Come, let us worship and bow down,

  bend the knee before the Lord who made us;

for he himself is our God and we are his flock,

  the sheep that follow his hand.

But we cannot be complacent about this. Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. We must depend utterly on Him in the process of putting to death our every act of self-seeking, which is always an act of self-exaltation. Our preferential option for the self stalks us like our shadow, entwining around our words, our thoughts, and most especially around our unconscious world. In that moment, we cannot appoint ourselves the champion to conquer the hidden armies of our revolt. Then, we are truly dependent only on the One who graciously humbles Himself to step into our flesh and to harrow the very depths of our last stronghold where we have not yet surrendered to His loving mercy. For it is He, the greatest, who makes Himself then the servant of our recovery.

  

From the archives: a seedy business

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) tells us how Jesus understands His own parable of the sower who went to sow his seed. Yet even this explanation does not exhaust the layers of meaning within it. The parable may apply in different ways to those who, it could be argued, have welcomed the seed and in whom the seed has yielded a harvest. Who among us has fully integrated the seed into our lives?

How do we hear the word of God without understanding? We do so by separating understanding of the faith from our devotions or our spiritual journey. This is arguably an even greater danger for those who have heard God’s call to intimacy and try to respond to it with more or less vigour. St Teresa of Avila preferred a learned spiritual director to a holy one; just think about that for a second. It means she was aware that mystical experience could be misleading without the compass points of the creed in all its depth and richness. In the inner life, while intimate knowledge of God comes through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, our normal progress is a life lived through faith in the mysteries and of the mysteries. Doxa (praise) and doctrine are not opposite poles, but oxen yolked together. Faith is not just conviction but conviction about something. To think of faith only as a conviction of the heart or an engagement of the will is to hear the word of God without understanding. Here, we must become literally disciples: i.e. those who learn.

The second class of people in the sower’s parable can also show themselves among the devout. They receive the seed with joy but fall away when adversity comes. If the first class of the devout suffer from lack of knowledge of the mysteries, might we say that the second class of the devout suffer from lack of self-knowledge? That and perhaps also radicality: self-knowledge because perhaps they thought quite wrongly that their initial joy in the word was proof of the depth of their discipleship; and radicality, because that discipleship requires precisely something much deeper, a greater depth of self-surrender than their current levels of maturity and self-awareness allow for. Did we think we were grown up because people address us as mister and misses?

Even the third class of people in the sower’s parable might be found among the devout in whom the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the word. For the worries of the world are not just tangible, material goods from which it might be easier in some ways to hold oneself aloof. The worries of the world can be the simple but subtle attachments that we have, for example, to how we are perceived or valued; or our belief that we deserve perhaps some grander task than the one we have ended up with. Yet this kind of fretting is also a blind spot obscuring the fact that our value and dignity in God’s eyes do not come about from what we achieve. Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire, says St Catherine of Sienna. If the world is not ablaze then, it is not because we have materially failed, and certainly not because people have failed to recognise how wonderful we disciples of Christ really are. It is because somehow, somewhere, in some subtle way we have damned up the graces that would flow out of us were we to be faithful.

But, we say, we have not gone in for the lure of riches! Look at our sacrifices! Well, that depends. Perhaps if we collect devotions and spiritual milk-bottle tops like the young now collect tattoos, we do choke ourselves with the lure of riches – riches that do not become a part of our life but lie on the surface and clutter our souls, like our unused kitchen gadgets or, heaven help us, our unread books.

Happily, our lives are a journey, not a fine art. In knowledge of God and knowledge of self, coupled with detachment, the seed of His word might produce more fruit in us yet

The two detachments and the one love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 16-23) sees Jesus in his role as Teacher or Prophet, the one who comes not only to rule as King, not only to sanctify as Priest, but also to guide and direct, to advise and enlighten, a mission that is complemented by the work of His Holy Spirit. The paradoxes come thick and fast: be wise as serpents but innocent as doves; beware of men, a paradox for Jesus has promised to make the disciples fishers of men, and how can one beware of what one is to fish? And then, those who love us best may despise us most. The prophecy of rejection must have been a shock to the disciples for their naïve Judaic imaginations probably envisaged the triumphant procession of the servants of the Messiah, whereas the Messiah among them prophesied that they would be as abject and unwelcome as Himself. This then is a cold comfort gospel for our contemplation, or is it? Only if we refuse the journeys which Jesus here bids that we take; only if we hear and hear but fail to listen to the melody that underlies it.

Simply put, this gospel calls us into harmony with two detachments: detachment from the self and detachment from others. Why must we be so detached? Are we only meant to be as cold as fish, we Christians? Not at all! Rather, the cause for both detachments is so that neither our love of self nor our love of others impede and stifle our love of God. In fact, we might go as far as to say that only those who do love God, who live in His love, who know themselves and others as beloved of the Father, and who reciprocate that love by His grace and His gift, can know what it is to love themselves wisely, and to love their neighbour as He has loved them.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, and he will remind you of all that I have said to you,

declares today’s Gospel Acclamation. That is the foundation of the love I have just evoked. That love is the complete truth: the truth about God, and the truth which we are called to live and to share with others.

And, then, we come to the impediments, the blockages, that hold us back or prevent our progress. But we cannot see them. Lost on the foggy moor of our own mind, we need adversity to bring us to an awareness of what it is we lack.

When they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak.

Why not? Because Christ has us and holds us, even when, perhaps most especially when, we feel most isolated and alone, even in our Garden of Gethsemane moments. What must it be to live those moments not overwhelmed by our own incapacities, but resting in Him who has promised us a kingdom?

Do not worry about how to speak or what to say.

But we worry incessantly, Lord, because we have not yet lost trust in ourselves. We say it is because we do not know what to say, or that there is nothing to say, or that nothing can be said. How often do we feel such things in the maelstrom of absurdity that is the twenty-first century? But our problem will ever be the same: we have been trusting in ourselves too much and not trusting enough in Him. We have taken the obligation to prudence and imagined it was the same as Wisdom. But Wisdom is a higher thing; it is not a human calculation but a divine insight that somehow makes sense; that makes sense because it is the fruit of His love, not of our mistaken self-belief.

But there is another detachment which still remains to come about: detachment from others. Jesus warns us that all our securities may yet be torn from us by the fallibility of men:

Brother will betray brother to death…children will rise against their parents…You will be hated by all men on account of my name.

Here again, the logic is similar to the logic of the detachment from self. We must not be detached because we are cold; rather, we must be detached so that our hearts can burn with the true fuel of love which is the will of the Father. We long for communion, but we too readily forget that our baptism calls us to root all communion in the Communion of Love that is the Blessed Trinity. So fundamental is this to us that this Communion is now to be preferred to all other communions; indeed, it is so fundamental to all communions that every communion not rooted in their Divine Communion is a mere illusion. The whole world could be united, living side by side in a most perfect harmony of sentiment, but if that sentiment were the love of this world’s promises, or the neglect of God, what harmony could it truly offer?

Peace is not peace unless it is first rooted in God’s peace which comes through forgiveness of sins. Concord is only fake concord unless it is rooted first in the reconciliation of the wayward children with their Father in heaven.

And this is why the man who stands firm to the end will be saved: not because stoicism and endurance are the source of our salvation, but because the raging love of God is. And when we love God truly above all things, and trust only in Him, then our love of self and love of our neighbour become what they are meant to be: an imitation of, and participation in, the unceasing and ever flowing love of the Most High.

 

 

 

The look of love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 9:32-37) sees Jesus cure a demoniac to which the Pharisees respond by concluding He is in league with the devil himself. He goes about Israel, proclaiming the good news, healing those who are sick and reconciling those lost in their sins. Having given this example, His heart is filled with compassion for those He ministers to, and He says to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few..  

On one level, this gospel is especially about the priestly vocation, the vocation to be a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and to gather in the harvest in due season. No matter the criticisms of Pharisees and others, the priest must pursue the work of the Lord out of compassion for the multitude. Nevertheless, these duties of the priesthood are paralleled by a wider collective duty imposed on all of us, and that we reflect on all too little, to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Parishes are being closed or amalgamated all over our country and in other European countries. Diocesan quangos with multiple MBAs are writing the taglines about being “Ready for mission” or “Sent to bear fruit”, but evangelical bromides can never cover up the corporate failure of self-knowledge. If we lament our lack of priests or the sadly ageing priesthood, we should also collectively lament, first, our failure to honour the vocation that feeds the priestly production line, the vocation of marriage with its call to fruitfulness, and second, our collective sin of omission to hear and obey this command of the Lord to beg for the extraordinary blessing of priestly vocations. If we do not sow with the Carmelites in prayer and sacrifice, we will not reap like the apostles.

In one sense, of course, all vocations are extraordinary. What a thing it is, what a beautiful thing it is, for the Lord to call our name and to say to us: Follow me.

If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

At the root of our personal vocations and the paths we take in our lives is this wider command, the universal call to holiness, to be conformed to the image of Christ, as adopted children of the Father so that He find in us the image of His son.

And yet the priestly vocation includes that conformity to Christ which encompasses His own relationship with His Mystical Body, the Church. People often prefer the language of the “people of God” these days, but that can be a very public and collective sort of phrase. The term the “Mystical Body”, celebrated by Pope Pius XII in his letter Mystici Corporis, says something not only deeply Pauline but also deeply intimate and spiritual, just as the body is intimate and spiritual, the person – the individual - incarnate. Now, the priest, the labourer who is sent to the harvest, shares Christ’s role as the privileged intimate partner of the Mystical Body. For only Christ as high priest, as head of the Mystical Body, ministers to that body, gives to it the spousal gifts of the seven Sacraments, and so helps it become day by day His worthy spouse, and fruitful beyond all measure.

This incidentally is why the priesthood cannot be reduced to a mere social function, to be seized on and instrumentalised by any individual, whether because they are socially privileged, or because of some ambient gender equality that is blind to the mystery that it represents. The sin of clericalism, an excessive reverence for the clergy, is only the opposite vice of anticlericalism, an excessive disrespect for the clergy. Somewhere in the middle stands a proper spiritually anchored and wisely tempered reverence for the priest as an icon of Christ, symbolised so beautifully in the customs of our Syro-Malakara or Syro-Malabar brothers and sisters who kiss the hands of their priests - not as an act of priestcraft but because the priest too is a kind of sacrament, the outward human sign of the inward grace of Christ who acts through him.

Every individual can reflect Christ in some way; this is the universal call to holiness. But just as in the Sacrament of the Eucharist only the foodstuffs of bread and wine can be turned into the body and blood of Christ for our spiritual nourishment, so in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, only a man can be made the icon of Christ's relationship with His spouse, the Church.

And in some mysterious way, the relationship is reciprocal. The priest who has left home and family and brothers and sisters and wealth can, if he lives the mystery of his priesthood in the spirit of Christ, discover that he is repaid a hundredfold in this life. For just as we have a duty to pray for more labourers to be sent into the harvest, so we have a duty to care for the labourers who are already there, men who are both privileged and afflicted by a calling which, according to some, requires of them all to be crucified before the end.

In answer to the many betrayals by priests who have become abusers, we have often heard tell of the serious difficulties of the priesthood. These should not be underestimated, of course. But no vocation can be understood and grasped only by its difficulties. Every vocation has its difficulties. The spirit of a culture of vocation is found rather in the beauty and the truth of every vocation. Perhaps, if we were to understand the beauty of our own vocations, we would live them with greater fidelity. For we love our grumbles and groans. But how much more have we cause to find in the blessed calling which each and every one of us has been given a glimpse of – just a small glimpse – the beauty of our loving God who pours out His heart for every one of us, even to the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His earthly life.

Every vocation then includes a calling to understand His compassion. Instead of looking down at our own misery, we should look up to try to catch in our Master’s eye that eternal compassion, His willingness to look upon the crowds who are harassed and helpless, casting upon them the gaze of a Shepherd who wishes to gather the sheep to Himself. And then, fixing it in our memories, we should go and try to share that same compassion wherever we can.