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. 

Hearing Him speak our name

Today’s gospel (John 20:1-2, 11-18) marks the feast of St Mary Magdalene and comes to us right out of the heart of the Easter liturgy.  Mary is perplexed by the events of Easter morning, sees angels in the tomb, and speaks to Jesus without even realising who He is. Finally, she takes off to see His disciples, becoming – as the preface of today’s Mass explains – one whose apostolic duty was honoured by the apostles. Her name will ever be associated with penitence and personal devotion to Christ; according to St Luke she stood among the holy women before the cross, with the Mother and the Beloved Disciple. 

The Mary in this scene of today’s gospel is more like Martha (Luke 10:38-42) who works herself into a domestic frenzy while her sister (another Mary) sits at the feet of Jesus, choosing ‘the better part’. She has come in the early morning to the tomb while it was still dark; she has already run back once to the disciples to seek their help; next she weeps in the garden before going again to the tomb where she sees the angels. She does not even recognise Jesus when she sees Him, no more than the disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is a common theme in the post-resurrection scenes of the gospel.

And yet, is there something - some obstacle – she has placed in His way by being in such a frenzy? None of her searching produces any results. Her first trip to the tomb is a failure; her second trip brings little help from the disciples; her third trip at least leads her to a vision of angels, but not to Jesus.

If Martha’s error was to be mindful of the many things, whereas only one thing was necessary, Mary’s error seems to be something similar. Yet, she is on a journey and passes through her own stages of grief: bewilderment at the empty tomb; a desperate search for help; a collapse into grief again; bargaining with Someone she thinks is the gardener. She thought she knew how to cope with the loss of her beloved Master but she powerless to do so... Only when Jesus speaks her name do the scales fall from her eyes. 

And thus it must always be. What must we do to hear the Lord speak our name? It might be easier to say what we should not do: we should not imitate Mary in the garden, except in her final action which is to obey her Risen Lord and go to preach good news of His return.

Unlike Mary, we must not fall into instant judgements about supposed calamities and disasters; we must not lose ourselves in grief – did she wonder in these moments if all this anguish was punishment for her own sins? And perhaps above all, we must not bargain: ‘all I ask, Lord’, ‘if you can only, Lord’, 'but tell me this, Lord', and ‘just grant me this, Lord’. All these things - the humanly necessary ones - will be added unto us when we seek the kingdom of God as He has invited us to do - the one thing truly necessary.

Lord, speak our names to us, for without your voice we are as lost as Mary.

Law and spirituality

Today’s gospel (Matthew 12:1-8) may be read by some as a warning against rigidity in the law. The Pharisees criticised the disciples for picking ears of corn and Jesus seems – some would suppose - to tell these hypocrites to knock off being so petty minded. It’s only a few ears of corn after all! Mustn’t get obsessed about the rules now, must we? But this is only to read the episode in a way that suits our let-it-all-hang-out, permissive culture.

Jesus of course teases the Pharisees with exceptions to their rule – for example, they cannot deny that David ate the loaves of the Temple, and that the Temple priests ‘break’ the sabbath too – but look how He bookends this teasing: Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple. By the end of this passage likewise, He stakes another claim on His position in the order of salvation: For the Son of Man is master of the sabbath. Master of the sabbath? But the sabbath belongs to God in Jewish law: indeed, it is the object of the third commandment. Here, as elsewhere, Jesus is claiming to be God.

Jesus’ talk of law may seem far from spirituality, but both spirituality and law seek the good of man in different but complementary ways. In human law, the law giver keeps the law, but the law is also meant to keep the lawgiver. This is why it is possible in some extreme circumstances to envisage overthrowing a lawgiver or at least to resist their requirements. The famous Nuremberg defence – I was only following orders from my superior – is no defence in human courts, nor perhaps before God. Neither the obligations of love nor those of obedience dispense us from responsibility. We must of course understand those responsibilities properly; Christianity is not anarchy.

The difference with Jesus, however, is that He does not simply give the law; He is the law, the way the truth and the law of life. The Pharisees wanted to acknowledge the Temple but here they were in the presence of Someone higher.

And that is the reason why Jesus allows the disciples to act as they do. In the gospel, the lower law of the Torah is about to be set aside in favour of the higher law of freedom in Christ. For in every command of the law, there is meant to be a dynamic towards God, for God is the end of all good things.

So that when Jesus requires mercy not sacrifice, He is not, like some hippy, saying, “Let it all hang out, man”; He is saying not to make an idol out of the lower laws. Or rather, obey the higher laws first.

And that is good spirituality. It is the spirituality of St Thomas More who resisted his king and found a martyr’s crown. It is the spirituality of St Athanasius who got himself excommunicated for standing up to the Arian heretics while Pope Liberius – the first pope not to be given the title of saint when he died in 366 AD – dithered and crumbled before their persecution. At least he later went into exile fearlessly.

Jesus will have mercy and not the sacrificial pyres that we build to honour our idols. The question for us then is whether we prefer the warmth of His mercy or the bonfire of self-interested human vanity. 

Bigger and bolder still

On Monday, we considered faith big and bold – big enough to ask the moon from God, bold enough to defy the scorn of unbelief that often surrounds us. Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 16-23) drives home the second of these messages, as Jesus bids his disciples to wake up and smell the persecution.

The most striking of His words here are: beware of men. It is not a message we hear very much these days; in fact, we tend to hear the opposite. Ordered to be afraid of being too inward looking, we risk losing our identity through excessive attempts at bridge building. We should build bridges of course, but we should not cast pearls before swine – Jesus said that too! While Jesus’ words are not a counsel of hostility, they are especially an encouragement not to succumb to idealism and naivety. Fellowship with others is important, but not if it unsights us. Cordiality is a sign of our charity but if we dream that serpents are harmless, we will show ourselves only to be as cunning as a dove…

Yet another theme in this dark passage, however, is that we cannot endure persecution or carry our appointed crosses without going on a journey towards self-detachment. If we are betrayed by our brothers, if our children rise against us, if we are hated by all men on account of Christ, how will we bear it otherwise? We talk about detachment, but we might see this matter also in terms of treasures. For where our heart is, there will be our treasure also. And where is our treasure? Where are we invested?

If we are invested in God, then these persecutions may indeed be endured – by His grace and power. Yet insofar as we have secret, unconscious, or even natural investments in all our other relations, then a time may come when we will have to struggle against the forces they exert upon our God-aspiring hearts. It is not that God does not want us to enjoy such relations; but it is that God will have no strange gods before Himself. And sometimes, it is only in a moment of persecution and trial that we find out what our real priorities are. Where do our horizons truly lie – on the edge of eternity or firmly in this world? We do not truly love others unless we are loving them in God and in the way God intends. 

For the wisdom we need to navigate our way among men, for the courage we need to endure the struggles of the age, we must rely only on Him who delivers us out of all our troubles. But the man who stands firm to the end will be saved.

Faith big and bold

Today’s gospel (Matthew 9: 18-26) relates two miracles both of which require faith but in different ways. Summoned to raise the deceased child of one of the officials, Jesus is touched by a woman in the crowd as He passes. Your faith has cured you, Jesus tells her. In the second miracle, Jesus raises a young child to life. This too requires faith on the part of her parents – the faith that brought the official to Jesus in the first place but also the faith to endure the scorn of the assembled mourners who are too familiar with death to think Jesus can do anything about it.

This gospel suggests to us that faith can be bold in two ways. First, faith can be bold in what it asks of God. Think big, ask more, even resurrection! Discernment is needed no doubt, but while God is not a slot machine or a sugar daddy, He is ruler of the universe. All the saints dream big in their petitions. All the great works of the saints grow strong through their reliance on God, expressed in that prayer of dependence that asks for its daily bread from the hands of a Father who does not want to give us a serpent. Think big, ask more!

And then there is the faith that endures in the face of adversity. We move in a cloud of unbelief, blown upon us by the assumptions of those around us. We are social creatures but when our sociability is too material, too animal, we find our faith faltering because it is not affirmed. What we need here is the boldness of the parents of the dead child – the boldness that defies the scorn of the multitude and opens the door to a Saviour’s visit.

And in the latter case, such a bold faith opens the mind likewise to the new society of the communion of the saints. Our sociability is saved also because Jesus calls us into the life of faith through His Mystical Body. Let the mourners – who cannot turn their minds from death – mourn; let the dead bury their dead. We live on through faith with our brothers and sisters as members of the Body of Him who created and redeemed us.

The quick and the dead

 Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 18-22) is one of those passages where Jesus seems unrelenting. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, He tells one scribe. Let the dead bury their dead but come follow me, He says to another apparently willing follower who had just suffered a bereavement. Nice one, Jesus …

It strikes me that, in such moments, the gospel writers give us the headlines but not always the context that was probably better understood by bystanders or those who knew Jesus’ interlocutors. Was there something in the scribe that was making a show of wanting to follow Jesus, but actually anticipated some kind of personal glory in being a chosen disciple? Did the man offer to follow Jesus while in fact seeking something else, perhaps himself? Jesus knew.

Likewise, Jesus’ response to the man who simply wanted to go and bury his father seems a priori harsh, but Jesus is the reader of hearts. While we do know the circumstances, we can be sure there was an agenda behind the man’s request, other than merely paying honour to his deceased parent.  And Jesus skewers it mercilessly. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.

There is another layer of meaning, however, in those words: Let the dead bury their dead but come follow me. The meaning of the second ‘dead’ – their dead - might seem obvious on the surface. It is a reference to the deceased, isn’t it? But who does Jesus call ‘the dead’ in the first place? In the latter case, the dead are perhaps those who are not alive to God, or at least those who are not trying to live in His will. They are ‘dead’ in the sense of being like a ‘dead weight’. They are inert and motionless. The dead are those who refuse to be what they are: wayfarers, like the rest of us. Let the dead bury their dead, therefore, is as much as to say: do not act like the dead. Be alive! Get on the road. Be alive to God and God’s call in this moment. Do not project into the future some moment of serving Him eventually. Serve Him now. Live!

What or who, then, are the dead that those who do not live are burying? The dead in the second sense is perhaps the world as it is laid hold of by those who are not alive to God. The world is always good, for it is God’s creation, but the way that we lay hold of it, especially if we are not alive to God, turns it into something dead. Here it is also a ‘dead weight’ but now in the sense of being a burden, something that weighs us down. And how much more will it weigh us down if we are not alive to God? The dead burdens of the world rob us of freedom. In the case of the man whose father has died, his attachments hold him back from doing what perhaps Jesus has given him to understand he must do now: be alive! Note also that this is not just about attachment to things. Our burdens can also be our habits and ways of doing things, our comfort zones, the price of our agreeableness, our intangible tethers that are deep down only the egotist's declaration of 'my way or the highway'. But our highways and roads lead nowhere. Only God's way, the way of the cross, leads to life.  

Let the dead bury their dead, says Jesus, challenging his listeners - challenging us - to live to God the Father, using this world and doing our thing only insofar as they do not hold us back in our flight towards Him.

Live and be free. This is Jesus’ challenge to us.

Healing, denial and need

Today's gospel (Matthew 8: 5-17) and yesterday's (Matthew 8: 1-4) are to a great extent about the same thing: healing. Yesterday, Jesus cured a leper who approached him, saying: Sir, if you want to, you can cure me. Today, a centurion approaches Jesus and asks for the curing of his servant. We dwell naturally on the centurion's request as a story of faith, the perspective that Jesus Himself reflected on as He marvelled at the man's willingness for Him to perform this miracle at a distance. Yet what comes before this act of faith in Jesus - for the centurion and for yesterday's suppliant leper - is a recognition that they have a problem and they cannot solve it themselves. 

 Sir, if you want to, you can cure me, says the leper. But the real question is not whether Jesus wants to heal him. The real question is whether the leper wants to be cured. We all of us cling to things of this world, both tangible and intangible. Most of us would like a little more comfort; many of us would like a little more respect. But our attachments go deeper than this. 

For sometimes, our attachments go as far as our wounds and weaknesses. We have the leprosy but, bizarrely, part of us does not want to be cured. To be cured means to surrender the advantages our wounds bring us, like a prisoner who knows that leaving prison means giving up a bed he likes, three square meals a day and also having to find a job. We are comfortable in our limitations, unchallenged by our easy vices. Being cured means having to think harder and to act with more responsibility because responsibility is the price of freedom. Being cured means not surrendering to our dissonant desires - our craving to be needed or our hardly-noticed but aggressive competitiveness. Refusing to be cured means hanging on to all the little lies we murmur ourselves to justify our behaviour. Everything can become a shackle that we cling to, even our sense of who we are, for through enslavement to our self image we run the risk of never waking up to God's dream for us. We all, as this blog said a few posts ago, are in danger of being merchants of our own glory, rather than being servants of God's glory.

 Sir, if you want to, you can cure me. When John and James asked Jesus (through their mother) whether they could sit at His right and left in the kingdom, He responded: Do you know what you are asking? But exchange is echoed again and again every day.

Sir, if you want to, you can cure me, we pray with hands folded in piety.

Do you know what you are asking?, replies Jesus. 

And thus He initially answers all our prayers. He is not the God of Merchandise. Our cures, when they come, are not part of some trade agreement; if we think of them in this way, we have mistaken our God for our grocer. Our deepest cures are - or they should be - the way in which we let go of the countless things we do not need in order to embrace more fully the one thing necessary. 

The leper wanted to let go of his leper's life. The question is now: do we?

Awe, astonishment and joy

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 57-66, 80) is suffused with three states of soul that are all necessary to sons and daughters of God.

When Zechariah told them that the baby’s name was to be John, his speech returned to him, and all their neighbours were filled with awe and the whole affair was talked about throughout the hill country of Judea. Awe is a great respect that is filled with wonder. Religion that is so filled with awe there is no room for intimacy is at risk of being cold or servile. Religion that is so filled with intimacy there is no room for awe is at risk of becoming selfish and manipulative. Awe reminds us that religion is itself a virtue, a part of justice, and it is especially owed to God and His great works. Yet awe is also connected to respect for the mystery of any other person – be they divine or human. Just as we sometimes write our desires onto our image of God, we often write them onto other people, and wonder why they cannot see things as we do. We lack awe and the humility is fosters.

Before the people felt this awe at God’s works, they were left first in a state of astonishment by Zechariah’s confirmation that the baby’s name was to be John. John was not a family name and its use was, therefore, unprecedented. We too need to awaken our capacity for such astonishment. For God and His ways are so different. Astonishment is a capacity for surprise, but fundamentally it requires a ready willingness for that surprise, an openness to the way of things that lie beyond my ken and beyond my conventions. Conventions are part of every society and are in fact very helpful, but not when they close down our freedom to the surprises of God. The habit of sin too closes our eyes to what might astonish us; perhaps this is why we think of astonishment and innocence as being closely linked. John’s name was a surprise. Jesus’ incarnation was a surprise. Astonishment is, as I say, our readiness to be open to God’s wrong-footing us. G. K. Chesterton ends his essay Orthodoxy with these beautiful lines:

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

If only we were prepared to be astonished at God, perhaps we would perceive this mirth more readily.

And the last mood that suffuses this gospel is that of St Elizabeth and it is her joy; simple and enduring, unperturbed by the lack of astonishment and the slowness to awe that left her leaders and her neighbours so clay footed. Joy – a fruit of the Holy Spirit and one of the actions of love. Joy - that God had worked a miracle in her life and called her son out into the wilderness until the day he appeared openly to Israel. The gospel records nothing of St John’s childhood other than that he grew up and his spirit matured. But can we imagine for a minute that his mother and the mother of his soon-to-be-born cousin never saw each other, especially given that the one had dashed to see the other as soon as she heard news of her pregnancy?

Mary too was filled with joy, and with astonishment and awe. For her joy came from a love so constant its like had never been seen; her astonishment came from an openness to God and His mirthful ways; and her awe issued from the depths of her Old Testament education which taught the Jews to cover their faces in reverence for God, like the Seraphim before the throne of the Almighty.   

May Jesus grant us all astonishment, awe and joy on this solemnity of St John the Baptist.

Mary, teach us to be joyful every minute of our life; teach us to be astonished every minute of our life; teach us to live in awe every minute of our life. Amen.

Standing firm

Today’s gospel (Matthew 24: 4-13) has both a collective sense and an individual application for us. Jesus speaks about world history, but His words also apply to our individual histories. And in a sense, it is only the latter that matters.

For whatever is happening all around us, whether we live in an age of Christian flourishing or an age of spiritual winter, we must – as the wretched anticlerical Voltaire said – attend to our own garden.

Never mind the grand conspiracies on the world stage: what deceits prosper in our own heart? How much do we lend an ear to agitations and agitators? How much do we let our faith be overwhelmed by the earthquakes around us, or by officious bullies who wield power in both Church and State? Our only consolation in these tumults should be the fidelity of Jesus to us. If we take consolation and strength in our own sense of self, in our rank or in the strength and rank of others, we are in danger of being let down.

“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and put to death.” In A Man for All Seasons, Richard Rich is desperate for Thomas More to give him a hand up in society, but when Rich claims that he would be faithful, Thomas tells him: “Richard, you could not answer for yourself, even so far as tonight.” Rich is a man with his faith in the upper classes, but he has no self-knowledge. He lives in deceit – deceit about himself and deceit about others – and thus, it is no surprise to find him involved as an agent in the handing over of More to his persecutors.

As one French mystic says, “Beware those who are in flight from themselves…” in flight because they too live in deceit about themselves and about the world around them. Love only grows cold in those who have embraced deceit – about themselves and about others – and are in flight. And where deceit waxes and love grows cold, so persecutions follow.

We think of persecutors with snarling faces like those who crucify Jesus in Gustave Dore’s engravings, but we only need look in the mirror to find a potential persecutor – a persecutor of others or indeed of ourselves. It is easier than we think to hate the self; grace means to forget ourselves, or at least to love ourselves only with the humble love of the Man God, free from deceit, averse to the lawlessness that follows on the loss of charity.

How many wasted hours do people spend over signs of the end and portents of things to come! Our challenge is here; the final act is now; the denouement of our lives may only be a breath away. In every moment of our lives, we have the chance to say ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’, like Mary did – Mary who beheld clearly on Calvary the coldness of men’s hearts and the persecution of her Son.

But Mary had first known the peace of the house of Nazareth and the gentle labours of faithfulness in her own soul, the soul of her spouse, and the soul of the Son she raised. We only need to stand firm with her (and with saints like More and Fisher). 

On vengence and ducks

Today's gospel (Matt 5: 38-42) sees Jesus again in rhetorical mode, like last Friday. In this passage, however, he piles example on example, all of which go towards making one essential point: do not return evil for evil. And yet, while Jesus does not want us to take revenge, there is another lesson hidden in these lines that in a sense goes more deeply into our behaviour. 

Of course, Jesus does not want us to take revenge: revenge is mine, says the Lord. We are often poor ministers of justice; we should leave it to providence to sort out most of our complaints. 

Yet as we read these injunctions in today's gospel, taken from the sermon on the mount, we get a hint of where the urge for revenge comes from. Look carefully at what Jesus asks: offer another cheek when one has received a blow; give away more than is asked of you; go not one mile but two miles out of your way. These are not just injunctions of avoidance; they involve the same kind of self-sabotaging subtlety as is found in the command not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, or to conceal your prayers and penance so as not to follow the Pharisees' example. Jesus is not just delivering a guide for living in these words. He is showing us something about our inner life. 

For the truth is that all but the holiest of us are calculators (and even holy people calculate a bit): we calculate the esteem we are owed and the goodness we are willing to pay out. We calculate how much we intend to punish others, or how fast our self-regard requires us to run away from danger. We are merchants of our own lunchtime fame, failing to see that the glory of the humblest thing is as mighty in Gods eyes as the glory of the greatest magnificence; that the rosebud and the giant redwood are in some regards equals. How much divine joy do we miss because we are busy calculating what is owed to us or what we are prepared to pay out?

We seize on some glorious quality granted us by God's gift and want unconsciously to square or cube it by our own self aggrandizement. We are slighted by the failure of others to appreciate us. Nothing seems as normal to us as our own entitlement. And when we become more conscious of the entitlement, we sometimes try to pay for its repression by an exaggerated abasement - which also involves a kind of calculation - as if our toleration of self-imposed bitterness was any less a form of pride than our naïve entanglements with vanity. 

In Jesus' command to give away our coat and tunic and go the extra mile, he gives us a means of disrupting this inner calculation, to turn over the tables of our internal trader and wreck the rule of such a currency exchange in our own hearts. What is worse than evil befalling us? That we should not live our misfortune according to God's lights but only according to our own calculations. This is why we are vengeful. Like greed, vengefulness already reveals an inner will to lay claim to things that are not ours. 

So, we must let go, and become what God intends us to be - we must live God's dream for us -  holding on to the good things of the earth (like coats and tunics) only as lightly as we hold on to the intangibles (our esteem and self-respect). 

And, so in conclusion, like F. W. Harvey, 

'From troubles of the world

I turn to ducks ...

***

When God had finished the stars and whirl of coloured suns
He turned His mind from big things to fashion little ones;
Beautiful tiny things (like daisies) He made, and then
He made the comical ones in case the minds of men
Should stiffen and become
Dull, humourless and glum,
And so forgetful of their Maker be
As to take even themselves - quite seriously.