Of salt and light

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A dangerous lack of self-knowledge

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6: 1-6) sees Jesus back in his hometown, preaching as He did elsewhere, but finding the people incredulous. After all, they knew Him, did they not? He was just Jesus, the carpenter’s son. They knew his nearest and dearest relatives. What on earth, they wondered, did He think He was up to, swanning around the place talking like a prophet? And so, Jesus worked few miracles there, and turned to other villages instead.

              In the middle of this scene, there are at least two mysteries that deserve reflection, and that give us cause for being humble. The first is that, often, the hardest thing to evangelise within us is the thing that is closest and most familiar to us. We take it for granted that we know ourselves, that we cannot be surprised by ourselves. Here, Jesus is among His own people who find it impossible to accept that they had misunderstood such a familiar figure, one of their own. They were wedded to the familiar so much – they had problematized it to such an extent– that to see its mystery was beyond them, as it is often beyond us. Affirming command of our surroundings, the sense of knowing our nearest and dearest: these things are part of our security. We do not like to think the unknown can get so close to us. It upsets our sense of safety; we are unprepared for its strangeness. But lo and behold, here is the Unknown among us, and unless our hearts are ready for it, we do not turn to face the mystery, and, by the same token, the mystery does not bring us the light we need. Our lack of awareness then should keep us humble; without humility, we risk letting the unknowns remain unknown.

              While this first lesson is an uncomfortable one, the second lesson is sobering. Why doesn’t Jesus just try harder with the Nazarenes? Surely, the thing to do in the face of such incredulity is to perform the big miracles. That way, they will believe, won’t they? Where does this refusal to go the extra mile come from in the Lord? After all, He has come down to earth for them; why not just grant them a glimpse of the power that lies within to defeat their resistance? Or why not organise some tables and chairs and conduct a conversation in the Spirit with the villagers, a pre-evangelization jamboree? He spends half the night talking to Nicodemus.

              To a great extent, the Lord’s choices in this moment are a mystery to us. Yet, perhaps it is something to do with His timing. Some people suppose that everyone else should share their culture with its sensibilities and customs. Others make a similar assumption that everyone lives in the same historical moment. Be wary of those who speak of the ‘modern world’, as if the modern world were as identifiable as a piece of self-assembly Ikea furniture or a flip calendar. Some of us are simply not the contemporaries of others; our mentalities, our virtues and vices smack of another age that only partially shares the contours of our own. For some of us, the parochialism of the present day is as dark as any of the supposed dark ages, while those who boast of their fresh innovations are unwittingly pale imitators of yesterday’s fashions. Yet the moment we live in is defined less by our preferences than by our unconscious biases. As we have said already, we can be strangers to ourselves.

The Lord knows all this. Nazareth will have another moment, but it will not be now. Now, the Lord will go and preach elsewhere. Like the first mystery, this second mystery then is another reason to remain humble lest we miss the Lord’s passing, the moment that God has chosen to intervene in our lives.

Jesus passed on, therefore, to other villages, but I wonder if, before He left the area, He looked back on that village of His youth and shed a tear or two over its resistance, saying:

If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

             

             

Of sorrows and joys

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5: 1-12) gives us so many criteria by which we can identify those who belong to God: happy are the poor in spirit, happy the gentle, happy those who mourn, happy those who hunger…In a way this is the counter agenda to so many of the values that prevail around us: happy are the successful, happy are the comfortably well off, happy are those who know how to look after their own interests first, happy are those who express themselves... Jesus’ criteria are self-effacing, turned towards God and neighbour; the counter proposals of the world are self-seeking, turned towards the ego, even when ostensibly focused on others, like the people who limit their families so the children can “have everything”.

Yet, for all the tension between these two sets of values, it is the last criterion of Jesus that is the most challenging for us. “Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you … Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” It is not our nicer virtues that are the deepest proof of where our hearts are turned. Anyone can be enthusiastic for the pleasant or even the generous dimensions of the gospel - feeding the poor, being a peacemaker, showing mercy: accolades for such actions are given to secular saints, as well as religious ones.

Yet, these qualities do not quite get to the roots of our heart. Ultimately and regardless of our state in life, the following of Christ grows out of an act in which we give ourselves totally to God and wherein God becomes our joy. The fiat of sorrow, which we are required to say in the face of persecution, comes out of the fiat of joy which is the fruit of our love for Him. There where our hearts are, there will be our treasure also. In today’s gospel, Jesus is not saying we should be happy because of the abuse, but rather we have an additional cause to be happy when persecution comes and does not rob us of what we treasure most… But what if it does?

Insofar as persecution takes our joy and robs us of peace, perhaps that is the measure of how far we have to go yet before we are truly united to Him; of how much we must long and pray for that union with him. According to the great French Dominican and master of mysticism Fr Garrigou-Lagrange, in Jesus on the cross desolation and perfect peace and joy dwelt together. In contrast, if suffering bends us all out of shape and traumatises us, perhaps that is because we are not yet fully surrendered to God and to the Father’s forming action. We may think we love the people around us, but the people we really love are those we refuse to be separated from, despite our suffering, despite what their love costs us. It is not the suffering that reveals who we are, therefore, but the steadiness of our hearts when the suffering comes: grace and joy under pressure.

Another gospel parable that illuminates these Beatitudes is the story of the man who found a pearl in a field and went away and sold everything he had to buy the field. We think too easily about the pearl in this parable, of what a great pearl it must have been: literally a pearler! But what lies on the other side of the parable – the untold story - is everything the man sold in order to obtain the field with the pearl. What did he give up? What treasures did this man part with to obtain that pearl? How angry was his wife that he was selling up the family possessions? What a fool did his neighbours consider him? How much pity did he endure from his drinking buddies?

But he had found the pearl of great price. The questions of those around him made no sense or were only fragments of an older story that was no longer the measure of his life and of his possessions. The pearl - a symbol of union with God - was now, he realised, everything he could ever desire or need in this world. 

The man was standing on a different horizon. And so must we.

Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you…for this is how they persecuted the prophets before you.

 

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.

  

Of treasures and pearls

Today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 44-46) offers us two of Jesus’ most exquisite parallels for the kingdom of heaven and its value. On the one hand, Jesus compares it to a treasure found in a field by a man who then sells everything he has just to buy that very field. Likewise, it is like a merchant who finds a pearl of great price and sells everything he owns just to buy that one pearl.

Sometimes, the gospel is almost beyond commentary. Jesus’ parallels were themselves an explanation; what more need do they have of further explanation? Yet our reflecting upon them is quite another matter, for while the similes of this gospel clarify the meaning of Jesus’ preaching, they do not yet ensure that we have interiorised the lessons they contain.

In a way, this is the very point of all our lectio divina exercises. Who is the man who finds treasure in the field and who is the merchant who locates a pearl of great price? Who are they indeed if not ourselves who have been gifted with a secret so precious but which is not yet secure? Before we come into possession of this treasure, this pearl, we have something yet to do: we must live in a way that shows we place the kingdom of God above everything else we value. We must say our yes to God at the centre of our hearts, and live through the experience of sustaining that yes by God’s grace when everything in us secretly or not so secretly says no.

Like the man who finds the treasure in the field, we know the value of the thing we have found. Covering it up is simply a gesture denoting its great desirability. But then comes the negative side of this parallel, if we can call it that: like the man who found the treasure and like the merchant who found the pearl, we must sell everything we have to obtain this one treasure. And how ready are we to do that?

All which I took from thee I did but take,

          Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms

says the Hound of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven.

On the surface, we can act out our readiness for such a sacrifice without too much trouble. We go to church, we say our prayers, perhaps we have devotions, and even take our spiritual lives seriously enough to do a retreat or two. But how ready are we really to sell everything we have, or to be separated from it, to obtain that pearl of great price? Is our heart really fixed on that treasure? Is our peace not disturbed by the loss of other worldly things? How close do we come to the example of St John of the Cross on whose head a wall and ceiling collapsed in the Carmelite friary at Toledo in 1577 and who was plucked from the rubble chuckling to himself? How convinced are we of that terrible but simple line of French writer Léon Bloy: Il n’y a qu’une tristesse, c’est de n’être pas des saints – there is only one real sadness: not to become saints.

The stoical English nationalist Rudyard Kipling told his readers they would be men indeed if they could meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. But perhaps a similar thing would be true for us too: if we could but value the treasure, the pearl of the kingdom, then we could meet with triumph and disaster and know that only separation from God is to our eternal harm. In principle, everything else ought to be grist to our mill, human losses we can chalk up positively in the quest for that one divine pearl.

This is all a matter of scale that takes us way beyond human calculation. How briefly the lesson of today’s gospel can be recited, and yet how vast are its implications in the landscape of our lives. There is no easy way to prepare ourselves to prefer the immensity of God to the limits of everything else. Only grace can achieve this in us. And the longest journey begins with the smallest step, away from that field where our treasure lies hidden and towards the freedom which God alone can grant us. 

Lambing time

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

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Today’s gospel (John 1: 29-34) is brief but, like all Scripture, revelatory. John the Baptist first declares Jesus the Lamb of God, a title that will be recorded again in the Book of Revelation and be enshrined in our daily liturgies. Then, John dwells on the fact that he did not know Jesus until he saw the dove descending upon Him at His baptism, affirming finally that I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.

Like John himself, this passage is simple and bare, unadorned, and stark in how it delivers its message. And yet, like many passages from the gospels, it tells us both about the Lord and about ourselves, at least ourselves insofar as John stands for us all.

It tells us about Jesus for it seems to foreshadow the vision John the Evangelist will share with us again in the Book of Revelation. Here, the Lamb appears in various guises: as shepherd, as conqueror, and as temple of the Lord. When the Lamb is first seen, John had expected to see the power of the Lion of Judah. The feast of heaven for eternity is also called the supper of the Lamb, and yet this Lamb is said to be slain as it were from the foundation of the world. In other words, this apparently simple image is multilayered in its significance: the person of the Lamb is the redeemer and conqueror of sin who bestrides all time.

If we look forward into time and eternity, we should likewise look back, starting firstly with the moment in which Jesus dies on the cross which St John again associates with the hour of the slaughter of lambs in the Temple. We can go back to the birth of Jesus, born in the very village where lambs were bred for the Temple slaughter. Into the Old Testament, the Lamb is there in Isaiah’s vision of the suffering servant, led to the slaughter like a lamb, and in the rituals of the Torah where the people of Israel are passed over because of the blood of the lamb smeared on their lintels, a moment echoed in every slaughter of a lamb that takes place in the Jewish liturgy thereafter. This Lamb of God is everywhere, then. And this is surely the point for John the Baptist who calls Jesus the Lamb in the hearing of his followers and those gathered for His baptism. John connects this central figure and symbol of God’s revelation and the Jewish imagination with the figure of the coming Messiah who takes away the sins of the people.

This then is Jesus: not the cuddly social worker of the liberal imagination, come to make us feel better about ourselves, but the blood-stained warrior, as meek as He is mighty, who comes to claim back His own from the grip of the devil. Now there is an answer to the question of Isaac to his father Abraham: where is the Lamb for the burnt offering? We also know the real significance of Abraham’s answer: God will provide. God Himself will come and save us, for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

The enormity of this revelation is truly beyond us: our limited minds cannot begin to encompass what its implications truly are. And here is where this gospel passage tells us also something about ourselves through the figure of John. For in John, as in us, God reveals Himself little by little. All the Fathers of the Church puzzle over John’s remarks in this passage: having refused at first to baptise Jesus, saying that he ought to be baptised by Him, how could John thereafter say that he did not know who He was until he saw the dove descend? We may wonder also what he means, for surely, even if he has not seen Jesus since their childhood – we know for a fact the Holy Family was mobile and travelled several times between Nazareth and Judea – how could he not have known the stories around his own birth and the significance of his cousin? The answer to these questions, we may hope to ask for in heaven, but that is not really the point.

Rather, the point is that John himself comes not simply to know Jesus – He knows He is the Messiah – but to know what that means, to know something more of the depths of that mystery of who He actually is; to be initiated further into that knowledge that Jesus says is the essence of the eternal life, i.e. to know Him and to know the One who sent Him. This is the blessing of John’s encounter with the Lord. It is not merely to have the privilege of making His paths straight; it is also to have an increasing knowledge and conviction, a revelation and vision, of this Divine Person. John’s journey in this regard begins in humility – I am not fit to loosen His sandal  - it continues with insight and understanding in his perception of Jesus as the lamb of God, and of course it is accomplished in his own sacrificial death where, in the name of justice and in the name of the true meaning of the spousal relationship, the great symbol of God’s offer to fallen humanity, he sheds his own blood in anticipation of the shedding of the blood of the Lamb.

We too are called to these transformations before the Lamb of God: an increasing awareness of the fact we are not fit for His blessing, a deepening understanding of who He is and what He means to us, and lastly the final act of offering where union with Him configures us to the Lamb, sacrificed as it were since the foundation of the world.

And beyond this comes the Lamb’s supper for the little lambs of His flock, lambed into eternity by the labour of the Lamb.

Where we find the Lord

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 1:29-39) shows us the organic rhythms that underpinned the life of Jesus and those that should underpin our own lives also. Jesus begins by visiting His friends, but His sociability very quickly turns into ministry, as He heals first Peter’s mother-in-law, then the sick from around the neighbourhood, and also delivers those possessed by demons. Then comes a moment of quiet which He creates for Himself, stepping away from the fray in search of recollection, before He is found by the disciples whom He exhorts to join Him in preaching throughout Galilee.

We may begin our reflection with Jesus’ last comment: for this is what I came for. Jesus’ life is our model in a special way because He comes to do the will of the Father, as He told Nicodemus: For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. We may speak in a sense of Jesus’ vocation in this case, for what is the will of the Father but the call He gives to Jesus to fulfil His purposes? We speak in COLW of both the personal vocation and the vocation to a state in life, the former a call to be or reflect some particular beauty of God and the latter a call to fulfil some common purpose in the life of the Church. The personal vocation is what or who we are, while the vocation to a state in life is what we do. In Jesus, the being and doing converge: He comes to give God’s gifts but He in fact is the gift He gives; He comes to redeem us, but He is our redemption; He is the victim for sin and the priest that makes the offering. This then is what He came for: to assume the responsibilities of a Saviour while being by nature the salvation that He offers us. Like Jesus, what we do does not exhaust who we are, but unlike Jesus, we can fail to live up to what we are called to be and what we are called to do. In this sense, what we said on Sunday still pertains: we must allow ourselves to be emptied out of everything unworthy in us in order to be able to follow Him in both His redemptive death and His glorious resurrection.

Another crucial pattern of the Christian life is also inscribed in this gospel passage: the alternation between mission and contemplation. If even Jesus, who possessed the Beatific Vision in His soul, withdrew to a quiet place for prayer, we may not – must not – excuse ourselves from the solemn duty of consecrating time to God in prayer and recollection. In this gospel scene, Jesus undertakes all the healings and deliverances that are required of Him by the local populace, but the very next day He rose early while it was still dark and went out to a desolate place to pray. The location is significant, but it is not necessarily what we think of on the surface. The gospel describes it as a desolate place but that could mean two things. On the one hand, surely, this was a quiet corner where nobody else went – not an easy thing to find in a busy shoreside town like Capernaum. On the other hand, it is not enough simply to go somewhere quiet when we pray, for where, as St Augustine says, can I go where I will not find myself? The desolate place that Jesus seeks in this moment of prayer is that place in our hearts where we are alone with God; where all the noise and bustle of our overstretched, overbusy minds have been let go of, where the tugging at our heart of unregulated needs and desires has been left behind for a moment, and where we can simply be who we are before the Lord. It is perhaps even harder to find that place in us than it is to find an abandoned place in Capernaum.

This too is another dimension of the COLW charism: the call to contemplation before action, or, one might say, the call for action and contemplation to be like the systolic and diastolic rhythms of the heart: the drive of life outwards and forwards, followed by the withdrawal of our energies to renew themselves in the heart’s rest.

And there is one more beautiful lesson of this gospel: that when the disciples look for Jesus, they can only find Him in this moment where His heart is at rest before the Father, in that desolate place of communion where the Father and He could be united in a different way, breathing in their mutual life of the Spirit. This is where the disciples found the Lord and perhaps it is where we should look for Him also.

A passage through the Jordan to life

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3: 13-17) recounts the episode of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan at the hands of his cousin John the Baptist. How strange are the paths of the Lord! Behold John, six months the elder of Jesus, sent before Him to make straight His paths, whose sandals he was not fit to loose, now performing for His Lord the ritual of symbolic cleansing from sin. Why? Why, indeed, when it was the sinless Jesus, the sacrificial lamb born in Bethlehem, who had come to deliver the world from sin? John himself is stricken with the question to which Jesus answers gently:  it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness. In other words, this is the will of the Father whose ways are nothing but justice and peace. While the voice of the Father thundered from the sky (according to St Mark), the vision of the opening heavens and the dove appear to be a private experience of Jesus, undetected by the assembled crowd, for the gospel says he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. This is another kind of Epiphany of that mysterious province where the ineffable Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, the Son, is joined to His humanity in hypostatic or existential union – body, blood, soul, and divinity, to use the classic formula. But why was His baptism a matter of all righteousness, according to Jesus’ word?

There is some mysterious link here between the passage that Jesus must follow, the journey He must undertake, in advance of our passage, our journey, towards God. It is not just that redemption by Jesus is a transaction of ransom paid to recover us from the slavery of sin. It is that of course, seen from one perspective. But from another, that redemption, the means chosen by the wisdom of the Father, required a transformation of the Son. Not, of course, that the Son can be transformed; properly speaking, as God there can be no change in Him. But here is the mystery of the incarnation, that the eternal Word of God at some point rose in human history like a newborn Sun to illumine the world, the eternal glory of whom was, as it were, emptied out so as to allow His eternal light to dwell substantially in the physical flesh of an Iron Age Israelite. When He tells us again and again in the gospel that where the Master is, there must the disciple follow, He is not simply pointing out an ethical or ascetical path of moral reform, like some Greek or Roman moralist, but signalling the need for a deeper, inner transformation whereby, in our own way but like Him, we too must be emptied out, not of eternal glory but of our bitter shame and rebellion, of our waywardness, of our unrighteousness, cleansed of the malice of our will and of the milky cataract of self-delusion that forms again and again over our inner eye. This transformation is part and parcel of our mystical death and resurrection in Christ, achieved sacramentally in our baptism, but requiring of us a faithful living out of its meaning in order for its reality to take flesh in us and transform us too, to make us like Jesus rising from the waters of the Jordan.

These are high matters and hard to define and grasp, yet their implications for us are spectacular. And light comes, as it so often does, from the letters of St Paul, specially the second letter to the Corinthians, where Paul specifically associates transformation in Christ with the attainment of righteousness. I give you the last section of Chapter 5:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know Him no longer in that way. So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! … we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

He made Him to be sin, i.e. as He would appear symbolically in the figure of a brass serpent healing the Israelites of a poisonous serpent encountered in the desert; as He would appear emerging from the River Jordan, baptised by John; as He would appear also eating and drinking with sinners; as He would appear most acutely of course, hanging on the tree of the cross, crucified between two thieves and despised and mocked by the holy leaders of God’s chosen people.

Why does God require us to step beyond the appearances in order to attain to a vision of His truth? Why does He not simply reveal all, blast His enemies, and be done with it? His reasons may remain inscrutable for eternity but what if they are something like this: what if the journey He takes us on, following the Son in a self-emptying, is also about working in reverse, about detoxifying, the self-dependent, arrogant seizing of knowledge and enlightenment inscribed in our first parents’ rebellion? Now, we can no longer proceed exclusively by knowledge, for we have abused it. We cannot judge Jesus by our senses alone, by our untrammelled logic and human wisdom. From our disobedience before that first tree of knowledge when we thought it would make us like gods, God intends to draw us to Himself by a new tree of apparent folly which will make us like his Son.

From the moment of this second tree onwards, we must go by the way we do not know, resigning ourselves to an act of confidence in this apparent failure of a Saviour, humiliated by an act of capital punishment. That now is the righteousness of God, for God’s righteousness can no longer be committed to our unsteady minds and hands except when we are transformed in Christ. Literally, He must remake us in Christ in order for us to be welcomed back into His kingdom. This is a mystery but not one we can access without the emptying out that God requires from each and everyone of us.

Ultimately, this is a mystery captured most exquisitely in those words of St John of the Cross at the beginning of the Ascent of Mount Carmel:

To reach satisfaction in all

Desire its possession in nothing,

To come to the knowledge of all

Desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to possess all

Desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all

Desire to be nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not

You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not

You must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not

You must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not

You must go by a way in which you are not.

When you turn toward something

You cease to cast yourself upon the all,

For to go from the all to the all

You must possess it without wanting anything.

In this nakedness the spirit finds its rest,

for when it covets nothing

nothing raises it up and nothing weighs it down,

because it stands in the centre of its humility.

 

…in the centre of its humility, like Jesus rising from the Jordan.

 

 

From poverty to riches

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 2: 1-12) gives us the only narrative in the gospels of the extraordinary visit to Bethlehem of wise men from the east. At first, they alight in Jerusalem, inquiring logically at Herod’s court for the whereabouts of the promised child king of the Jews. Informed by the scribes that the king of the Jews is to be born in Bethlehem, Herod sends the wise men on to the town where they indeed discover the child with His mother Mary and fall down to adore Him with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they avoid Jerusalem on their return journey home.

In this gospel we have a model of two ways of engaging with God: the way of the rich and the way of the poor, although I do not mean this in a financial sense. Herod is the personification of the rich pursuer of God. He is rich but only according to his own self-deceit. First of all, he is inattentive to any spiritual signs; these, after all, have to be brought to his attention which is fixed most likely on the things of this earth. Herod hopes for nothing in life, for he lacks nothing, at least in his own eyes. Therefore, when the star is pointed out, it is not an occasion of wonder but of worry: what does it mean, what is its significance? These questions are not asked in a spirit of open, honest inquiry, but of fearful, grasping anxiety. He does not ask what he stands to gain by this heavenly mystery but what risk it poses to a life that is all too material.

But, you might ask, is it not a good thing that he asks the chief priests and scribes for an answer? Yes, and no. I am not a praying man, says the drunken George Bailey in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is precisely because of this failure that George cannot at first take in the lessons that he needs to learn. Herod likewise is not a praying man. Of course, he should ask the priests and scribes about the star and the king of the Jews, but he should first ask God; he should first turn his attention to the Most High. He should not consult the priests like soothsayers, but only as ministers of God, his Creator. It is possible to pursue knowledge only to conquer but that is not how God wishes us to be enlightened. Receiving the knowledge of the prophecies without first bowing in humility to God, Herod can only then bend that knowledge into a devious plot the design of which is only made apparent by the dream the wise men have in Bethlehem. Those, like Herod, who treat the pursuit of spiritual knowledge like a conquest, the outcome of some endeavour of untrammelled curiosity, are likely to abuse its fruits. Such was Herod’s intention, and we remembered its bloody outcome on the feast of the Holy Innocents.  

This then is how the rich pursue God: self-sufficiently, driven on by the conquest of curiosity, inevitably instrumentalizing the knowledge they seem to acquire for their own self-satisfaction.

The poor of the Lord, the anawim, must take another path, the path of the wise men. We saw His star when it rose and have come to worship Him, they say to Herod in words that tell us much about the differences between them and their royal interlocutor. They began by looking up, not to their own needs but to the wonder that God had placed in the heavens to be noticed. We do not know how they prayed, but the quest they set out on has as its final objective an act of worship to the One who was to come.

Not that their journey was an easy one. How high their hearts must have been when they reached Jerusalem and the royal court: the end of a long and wearisome journey in winter must have seemed in sight. And yet, they had to go on, their minds full of doubt after the secret questioning of Herod. How very like the searches of the poor ones of the Lord! For God does not intend for us to take the journey we envisage but the journey He knows we need, the one that is not only for our good but for the good of others also. Perhaps then the wise men needed to pass through Jerusalem, not only to see the corruption of the seat of Jewish power, but as a sign to the increasingly purblind scribes and keepers of the Scriptures that history was accelerating, that events were unfolding beyond their ken, and that the Lord of History had finally come, although not in the way they had anticipated.

On the wise men go to their final destination where they offered that act of worship they had longed to give and handed to the mother of the king of the Jews the gifts they had transported, doubtless with some anxiety. Opening their treasures, says St Matthew: normally, it is the recipient of a gift who opens it. In this scene, God had made Himself so helpless in His incarnate form that these poor ones were obliged to do this for Him, for God does not want those who seek Him merely to be passive but to be cooperators or, better still, communicants in this wonderful encounter. No doubt as they opened their gifts to Him, they found themselves immeasurably repaid for all their troubles…   

…troubles that were not yet ended. For those who have come closest to the Lord are not thereby spared trials; they undergo them in a different way. We, the disciples of the Lord, are called to follow His example, becoming figures of His life and suffering after the fact, but in the Christmas and Epiphany narratives, it is the participants who become figures of the life of Christ to come. Thus, just as the Holy Innocents shed their blood in advance of Jesus, in this gospel the wise men fled the country, foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family from the murderous intent of the tinsel-crowned power monger in Jerusalem. Blood will have blood, says Shakespeare’s homicidal tyrant Macbeth, and yet in the end, even these intentions are made to work against the kingdom of evil. The shedding of innocent blood thus betokens the arrival of a kingly conqueror whose priesthood will remake the earth with its suffering. The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are thus not only gifts but signs of Him who was to come.

Thus are the poor ones of the Lord made rich in a mystery hedged about with the significance of the Lord’s desires and His irresistible purposes.

I watch the sunrise

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 67-79) is a moment of prophetic insight and praise, as Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit and speaks words of glory, thanks, and foresight that Christians down the ages will daily repeat. Looking back to David and Abraham, he recalls all the promises of God to His people who delivers them from their enemies and redirects them along the paths of holiness. Lastly, he reflects on his son’s own destiny to be the prophet of the Lord who announces the tender mercy of God and starts the fire that will bring light to those in the shadow of death. These are words that tells us about ourselves but mostly about God.

About ourselves we prefer to believe anything but the truth, but in truth, we are a sorry lot if Zechariah’s prophecy is anything to go by. For, who are the enemies from whom God delivers us if not ourselves, our own worst enemies? We have been the agents of our own shipwreck, and it takes a Divine Redeemer to right the ship on our behalf. God’s redemption is offered so that we might serve Him in holiness and righteousness all the days of our lives for, by our own lights, we are likely to follow a path of injustice which is at best enlightened self-interest, and at worst, a careless disregard of the good of others and of ourselves. And it is indeed God’s tender mercy that we need for we sit in darkness and the shadow of death. For even when we are redeemed, we are entirely capable of preferring the gloom to the Lord’s illumination. We cannot stand too much reality, for we try to bear its weight with our own strength. The doorway into night is held open by our own hand.

A sombre picture? No, this is the fruit of Zechariah’s nine months of mute reflection. Gripped by the Lord’s imposed discipline, Zechariah emerges from his own grand silence to give expression to that least flattering of the truths of the faith: that God alone can save us. Ours is an existence of dependency. But Zechariah at the same time gives expression to that most beautiful of the truths of the faith: that God wishes to save us. And not only wishes to save us but, to that end, has done everything which stands within His power to do, short of removing our free will and dragging us home by force.

Instead of which, He has raised up for us a horn of salvation, He has sworn an oath of deliverance to Abraham, and - most personally to Zechariah - He has sent the prophet of the Most High to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins…

Ultimately that we serve Him without fear, as did Joseph who walked to Bethlehem beside a beast of burden carrying his heavily pregnant spouse, who fled the violence of a tyrant king to save mother and child, and lived a while in Egypt from where he would emulate the great Joseph of Egypt and lead this flower of God’s new people back home to the promised land.

The tracks of that path from Egypt back to Israel, from bondage back to freedom, are the way of peace that Zechariah prophesies here. This path will eventually be the way made straight by the voice of John the Baptist, the royal road of the cross hallowed by the Lord’s bloody footsteps, and the only option for the disciples who would follow their Master.

We need not travel all that distance tonight, however. It only remains for us to hear the words of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven to the sinner:

Rise, clasp my hand, and come!

Come out of the shadow of death, out of the darkness of sin, to take our place beside Zechariah, Joseph, and John the Baptist, and cast our eyes on the grace-filled sunrise which begins now in the crooked crib of a newborn babe.

***

The blog is now in recess until 6th January.