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

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

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

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

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

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To cite again the words of Flannery O'Connor,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little light on the matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mors et vita duello

Conflixere mirando.

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

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

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

Dux vitae mortuus

Regnat vivus.

The Leader of Life dies yet reigns and is alive.

A little touch of Jesus in the night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Easter Recess

The COLW Blog is now in recess until Low Week. 

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

Many blessings upon all readers in this time of grace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Going to the heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sweet the nails, and sweet the wood,

Laden with so sweet a load!

 

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

 

But, only from its heights...

 

The original follower of Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the archives: on NOT falling like Satan

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10:1-12, 17-20) sees Jesus sending out the seventy-two disciples. He gives them many counsels which they should follow as they carry out their ministry and preach the gospel. We dwelt on most of this passage in October 2024 where the theme of the blog concerned the difference between the wolves and the lambs. Today’s passage also includes the return of the disciples and Jesus’ advice about how they should reflect on their recent actions in which they had exercised extraordinary charismatic gifts. The lessons he gives them then are stark and concern us all today:

I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven

He tells them. The disciples are elated, filled with wonder at the things they have done. They know it has come from Jesus’ power, and yet in that corner of the human mind that is always looking for a glimpse of itself in the minds of others, there is always the danger that their wonder could evolve into vainglory: an egocentric passion that attributes the good done to ourselves, rather than to our maker.

This is the point of Jesus’ recollection, for recollection it is; not a human recollection but a thought from God’s mind, a thought that was there even before Satan used his freewill against his maker: this creature has turned against me and my reign of love.

There is no pain in God, for God has no emotions in the sense that we understand them. And yet in these words, do we not hear the pain of Christ, the incarnate God, one who has been sent as redeemer to the human race but who cannot save the fallen angels? It is surely not beyond God’s power to have offered them redemption of course, but the angels as pure spirits knew precisely what they did when they revolted against God. It is only our susceptibility to ignorance and deceit that means our wills are not locked in a state of malicious, self-destructive rebellion.

What is the antidote to this calamitous revolt of Satan? What lesson can the seventy-two draw from it? Jesus offers it to them not in parables but plainly:

Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

In other words, what they accomplish is less important than what they are by God’s choice and election: His children, beloved of the Father, invited to the eternal banquet. Some of us may do great things from a human perspective; others may accomplish little, humanly speaking. Some may know renown; others may be little thought of or dismissed. Little of this matters in an eternal perspective, though it feels so terribly important to us now. 

What matters rather is placing ourselves in the arms of our Saviour who has come to help us carry our burdens, even or especially those we inflict on ourselves, for whose fault was it that we sinned? I return here to a line of Shakespeare oft quoted on this blog:

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

Rejoice that our names are written in the bosom of the Father; rejoice that before we loved Him, He first loved us. This is our glory: the care, the condescension, the favour and abiding affection of the King.

From the Archives: a loving yes

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 28b-34) sees another of those dialogues between Jesus and a private individual – in this case, one of the scribes. Which is the greatest commandment? he asks Jesus, and Jesus replies by citing part of the Shema Yisrael, a key text in the morning and evening prayer of the Jews that declares God’s oneness, our duties to Him, and notably the duty to love God and love one’s neighbour. Yet it is the scribe’s response to this reply that strikes us: before Jesus, he declares this law to be much more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices of the Temple. Jesus offers him an answer, but the scribe – as if he knew full well the answer – then gives us perspective on that answer. Not only is this the best commandment but it is better than all the liturgical grandeur of Temple sacrifice. Jesus in turn blesses his reply, declaring: You are not far from the kingdom of God. What are we to make of this exchange, for many of us no doubt offer up our prayers, works, sufferings and joys every day to God? Have we mistaken the wood for the trees? Should we simply be trying to love God and do what we will?

But that would be too simplistic a way of understanding what is being said here. This dialogue is not a reason to neglect sacrifice but rather to understand it in its true context. This dialogue is not a reason to pretend we are not material beings for whom the physical representation of religion is nothing but a mirage. Our God became incarnate, and our religion is incarnate in order for us creatures of flesh and blood to reconnect with the transcendent and divine. This dialogue then is an invitation to understand the true heart of our liturgy and prayer and to assimilate all our actions into it. In a way, it is another reason why the Colwelian yes must run deep in all our actions.

Is love of God greater than burnt offerings? We must distinguish. Love of God transcends the sacrifices of the old covenant. In the new covenant, however, there is only one sacrifice, and it is the sacrifice of the Son who offers Himself to the Father: behold, I come to do your will. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that this ‘cup’ of the Father’s will, this path He requires Jesus to walk, should pass from Him, and yet in the end, your will be done.

In us, sacrifice and will seem separate and potentially at odds. Sometimes by God’s grace we offer sacrifice for the right reason; sometimes, we may be trying to prove something to ourselves; and sometimes, God help us, we may be engaging in an exterior performance, doing the right thing while never really truly surrendering to God in our hearts, in danger of becoming hypocrites. Genuine hypocrites – if we can get our head around that idea - pretend to make sacrifice only for self-interested reasons. But in Jesus, despite the struggle in the garden – a struggle He allows His human nature to feel to the point of sweating blood – there is no true distinction of self and sacrifice at least from one perspective: Jesus as the God-Man offers His sacrifice, but in some mysterious way He is His sacrifice too: it is in a sense one with His being, for He is the Paschal Victim. His sacrifice is His total yes to the Father in heaven. All His efforts are subsumed in this action of love and submission to the Father and bring the gates of hell crashing down, opening the floodgates of grace to the world again if only the closed hearts of men could receive it.

And this is why the scribe is not far from the kingdom of God: he senses in the order of liturgical sacrifice a greater order that proceeds from love and submission to the will of the Eternal Father. For us living under the conditions of the new and eternal covenant, the lesson is clear: every one of our sacrifices only makes sense when it is plunged in the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus’ yes to God, a yes He was only able to make because Mary first offered her yes at the moment of her annunciation.

Thus, our prayers, works, sufferings and joys are not independent sacrifices looking for their own justification before the throne of God. What brings them to life is the sacrifice of Jesus, represented for us in the Eucharistic sacrifice, where through the actions of the ministerial priesthood acting in the person of Christ, the Church as it were tunes again into that eternal yes of Jesus. Every liturgical action and every daily action is animated by this life force of the will of Jesus which is a will to love God and love neighbour. Nothing now is alien to us, other than sin. And, we need not be afraid of our failures, for our sufficiency comes from Jesus. His life becomes ours; His action informs ours; His yes can become ours as a gift of His grace.  

O Mary, teach us to say yes to the Lord every moment of our lives

From the Archives: Sweet conceit

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 4: 24-30) should be sobering for us.

We read in this gospel of an attempt that was made on Jesus’ life. Until the moment of His passion, this is the only event in which His life is threatened during his adulthood and in which the hands of the would-be murders are placed upon Him. But the really shocking thing is that this happens in His own hometown. And not only is His life threatened, but the townspeople lead him towards a cliff to throw Him down it. One imagines this place to be the scene of countless childhood games for the youth of the area, for children are always drawn towards danger. And now, it is set to become the place of a brutal and murderous assault.

What is most concerning here is that the people laying hands on Him are those who have known Him for the longest time. It is His neighbours and perhaps even some former friends who are suddenly filled with this violent compulsion against Christ. How skin-deep the appearances can be! Those who have known Him best have the dubious distinction of being those who have threatened Him most. Was this simply because of His identifying Himself with the prophecy of the Messiah a few verses before today's extract begins? Yet it is not that which sparks their anger but the implications He makes by saying He will work no miracles in Nazareth as He had done in Capernaum, just as the earlier prophets had been selective in their missions. He offends their sense of entitlement; He contradicts the implicit story this people tell themselves about their closeness to the Lord.

The lesson for us is simple: we should beware of shallow familiarity with Christ. Familiarity breeds contempt. Easy acquaintanceship is a trap, a counterfeit of true intimacy. We are called to something much deeper and much more alive. We are called to a friendship which would defy the madness of crowds and the bullying self-justifications of a mob who find their reassurance in the fact that everyone shares their inclinations and their outrage. What has Jesus told them that makes them so mad if not that they must not stand on their privileges?

Every one of us, and especially the most powerful, should give serious thought to the dangerous seductions that our supposedly sweet but secretly self-congratulatory intentions give way to. What defenders of the honour of the prophets must these violent neighbours of Christ believed themselves to be! How much steadier and more sensible was their view when compared to that of this young upstart Jesus! How much more respectable were they than a man who had broken every rule of good sense and respectability by tipping over the tables of money changers in the temple!

Like these Nazarenes, however, we should beware of sweet conceit.