On being God's gift

 Today's gospel offers us another extract from St John's account of Jesus' ministry. St John's gospel is in a special way a COLW gospel, because so much of what is close to the heart of COLW - vocation, contemplation, incarnation - is sown throughout it. Today's passage from Chapter 6 reminds us a little of Jesus' priestly prayer in Chapter 17 during the Last Supper because it tells us something of the extraordinary mystery of life that passes between the Father and the Son from eternity. 

All that the Father gives me will come to me,

and whoever comes to me I shall not turn him away;

because I have come from heaven, not to do my own will,

but to do the will of the one who sent me.

Now the will of him who sent me

is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given to me,

and that I should raise it up on the last day.

So many truths of our faith are summed up in these profound lines: the Father's eternal begetting of the Son, the Son's role as high priest of redemption, the submission of the Incarnate Son to His Father, the Divine Will and the resurrection of the dead. Passages like this remind us that the Good News is not primarily a way of life but the reality in which we live (and where we must live the life we are called to). 

T. S. Eliot writes, "Humankind cannot bear too much reality," and he is mostly right. But we need not bear it, so much as open our minds to its power which is the power of the Father who has given us to the Son as His gift. And in opening our minds to its power - through prayer, through the desert we make for ourselves in our hearts amid the busyness of life - we can begin to find our place in His heart, in the world to which He has called us, and in the will of the Blessed Trinity. We need not so much to do His will as to live in it. 

When I was young, one of the more refined insults girls would use about a boy was, "He thinks he's God's gift". The startling truth is that when we surrender to the Father as Christ submitted to Him, He is able to make us a gift to His Son. We become part of a series of gifts whose brightest jewel is of course the Blessed Mother who was given to the Son not only in the moment of her Fiat but in her Immaculate Conception.

May COLW be a little grapevine in your pure hands to quench the thirst of Jesus we pray in the COLW Thanksgiving after Holy Communion. In other words, may the Mother who was Jesus' first gift help us become the gift the Father offers to the Son, so that we may all become one day - that day of the resurrection of the dead - the gift that the Son places back in the bosom of the Father forever.   

Seek the things that are above

In the letter to the Colossians, St Paul outlines an agenda for us which is entirely appropriate for this Eastertide: 

Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God: Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth (Col 3: 1-2).

Today's gospel unpacks some of the essence of this command. Addressing his disciples, Saint John the Baptist says:

He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly and speaketh of the earth.

There seem to be two ways to read this line. On the one hand, St John draws the same distinction between 'above' and 'the earth' that St Paul later draws. That which is 'of heaven' implies spirituality and the truth of things. That which is of the earth is 'earthly' and seems to be implicated in a refusal of the Son (which, lest we forget, is a grave sin). 

But in another sense, we know that Jesus is not just from 'above' but also of 'the earth'. He is so much of the earth that nothing but a bodily resurrection would suffice to show His victory over death. Likewise, He is so much 'of the earth' that the channels by which He communicates His grace to us are earthly also. We bathe in the waters of baptism, we assist at a sacramental representation of His sacrifice, and we eat of His flesh and drink of His blood. We too, as His disciples, are of heaven and of earth. The glories of His redemption are given to us through the humble things, and the radiance of His eternal love can be communicated through the lowly gestures that accompany the most apparently mundane of lives. He is the God of pots and pans also. 

This dimension of the Christian life is precisely what is meant by incarnational (cf COLW Book of Life). We pray that everyone whom we meet will find in us 'the Word made flesh in Mary'. If we seek the things that are above in this Eastertide, we should become not less earthly but more earthly in this positive sense. As our hearts are lifted up to Christ, our feet should be more firmly planted on the soil which was blessed by His sacred feet. In that way, we will give our minds less to the the distractions of this earthly life, and enter more into the hidden riches that God has sown in the humble things of this world. 

The trial and hope of Easter morning

This morning's gospel relates how St Mary Magdalen came very early to the tomb on Easter Morning. There is something crucial in the timing: it was still dark. Mary at this point was still going through a trial that had started with Jesus' arrest. She had very little to sustain her, knowing only the destruction of her Master's body on the cross two days before. Yet if there was one thing worse than that broken body, it was coming to the tomb and finding it empty. He was not where they had left Him on Friday afternoon. She does not conclude resurrection ... but rather grave robbery: ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb’ she said ‘and we don’t know where they have put him.’

Sometimes, we are so very like Mary. We meet the circumstances that Our Lord leads us into in all their apparent gloom. We live too much with the assumptions of how we think things are ... or ought to be.  We find the gloom around us to be a confirmation of our night, when it is in fact just the dark before His dawn. Instead, we need to wait a little for His hand to be revealed.

We often rightly see Easter as the feast of Faith, for as Saint Paul says, if Christ be not risen, then our faith is in vain. Nevertheless, in the dark of Easter Morning we can see that it is also a feast of Hope. If only we can dwell in the dark, like Mary does after Peter and John have gone; if only we can continue to search for Him through the gift of hope - the hope of grace now and glory later - then in due course, we will be able to reach out, touch the hem of His garment, and hear Him call our own name.

No matter how dark the morning, it is always the morning since He rose again.