Emptying out for greatness

Today's gospel (Luke 22: 24-30) is another example of how later episodes in the life of Jesus provide a commentary on earlier ones. The scene is the Last Supper. The disciples argue about who should be considered the greatest. And Jesus offers two lessons; first he points out that the greatest among them will be their servant, as He has made himself their servant; and second, He promises them that they will be exalted in the world to come as the judges of Israel.

Let us deal with the second of these. The future that Jesus promises the disciples is not our own. Theirs was a particular vocation related to their exalted calling as his principal witnesses; the members of the College of Bishops today are simply the heirs of this august group. What then is our own future, if we are faithful to Him? St Paul tells the Corinthians that eye has not seen nor ear heard what things God has prepared for those who love Him. Yet eternal life is not ultimately about conditions but about persons. Our future, if we are faithful unto the end, is to breathe forth our souls in peace with the God who has loved us from eternity. Hearts can be filled according to the measure that God has called them to. May we all be thus filled.

What then of the first lesson? In answer to the disciples' shallow one-upmanship, Jesus offers instead His own example of what St Paul again calls 'self emptying'. Jesus did not come to stand on His dignity, even if St John the Baptist says he was not fit to undo Jesus' very sandal. Rather, He lowered Himself in the eyes of the world from the very first moment of His earthly life, conceived in the womb of an obscure daughter of the House of David and born surrounded by animals and their filth. Look around the stable and what do we see? The witnesses of Christian self emptying.

By tradition, we observe a donkey - the little donkey of the carol - the diminutive cousin of the nobler horse, known especially for its dogged, plodding willingness as a beast of burden. There is no glory here; only the example of a willingness to submit to the crosses that accompany our obscure lives. Yet it is not the lion or the horse who accompany Jesus into Jerusalem but the donkey ... with shouts about his ears and palms beneath his feet.

Next to the donkey, again by tradition, comes the ox - symbol of the priestly cast and thereby often used as the emblem of St Luke whose gospel opens with the story of Zechariah. Yet what is the ox in the stable menagerie but a humble ruminant, chewing over and over again the extraordinary scenes in which it now figures? No glory here either; the power of the ox is not developed in a gym but comes from its grazing and rumination, as steady and as fixed as the eye of the contemplative who drinks in daily the mysteries of the Beloved.

But my favourite witness of Christian self-emptying in the stable is the straw of Jesus' crib. The straw - the spikey, bloodless, pele mele straw, incapable of providing comfort by a single strand alone but when bundled up and wrapped in cloth, a more than adequate mattress for the newly born Christ Child. How we can identify with the straw - with our distracted prayers, our resurgent needs and half-baked promises! Easily blown about, too cold, too weak - and yet here gathered together to be the comfort of our Saviour. 

It is as the failing eyesight of the poet John Milton saw: they also serve who only stand and wait.

Of rebellion and redemption

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 46-56) needs no introduction to a COLW audience. It is for many of us a daily prayer. For all those who want to turn towards God, it is a kind of anthem, a celebration of God’s gracious gaze upon His servants, of His providential power, and of His enduring faithfulness to Abraham and his descendants forever.

But there is something else in the Magnificat which is also tangible: the reality of revolt and the reality of fidelity, the contrast between rebellion and redemption. In this light, two outstanding temptations beset us every day: the temptation to make peace with our sins, and the temptation to think God won’t mind them because He is a loving God. But they are lures in a world full of mortal danger.

The only human being who has ever been truly justified in being at peace with their choices is the Blessed Mother. Conceived without the stain of sin and constantly attuned to God’s will, Mary’s joy is to exult in God at every moment of her life, even in her greatest trials. The Magnificat tells us this. If we do not exult in the same way as Mary, it is because despite our resolutions and efforts, we are still children of rebellion.

Let us not think that the proud of heart who are routed by God in Mary's words are some other class of sinner to which we do not belong, thank heavens. We are the proud of heart when we refuse God’s rule over our choices. We set ourselves up as princes to be pulled down from our thrones when we prefer our way to God’s.

No human felt more justly proud than Peter when Jesus classed him as the rock of his Church (Matthew 16: 18-19), but within a few verses we see Jesus denounce Peter as Satan (Matthew 16: 22-23) because he judged the prospect of Jesus’ suffering from a human and not a divine perspective. Here Peter enters into rebellion simply by imposing his worldly judgement on the circumstances of the Passion that Jesus prophesied for the disciples. Would that Peter had a tenth of the Virgin’s wisdom to understand how sin had misled humanity and how far the plan of salvation would have to go – to the very roots of our souls! – to bring us back from the brink.

And here the second temptation becomes germane. If God does not really mind our revolt, why on earth does He tear the mighty from their thrones? Why on earth does He feed the starving with good things and send the rich away empty? Again, we must not see this purely as some kind of social commentary. Who are the rich if not those who are full of themselves, their own sufficiency, their own satisfactions and their own plans? Who are the rich if not ourselves when we make our own choices into the treasure we long for? Yet we do not know what is good for us. If God cares about sin, it is not because He is a rigid rule giver; it is because He knows that we can never be happy ultimately unless, as St Augustine says, our hearts rest in Him. But for that, we must come down from our pinnacles of pride and turn to penance.

If God were not to cast the mighty from their thrones, if He were not to mind that we choose ourselves over Him, He would be giving up on being God. Mary’s Magnificat not only tells us about her own vocation. It tells us about the kind of God who loves us so much, that He is willing to conquer every obstacle we place in His way, in all our rebellion against Him, if we will but let go of our tinsel crowns and seats of power and join our ‘yes’ to Mary’s ‘yes’. 

The Magnificat is a resounding 'yes' to God's reconciliation and 'no' to the revolt that sets us against Him. We cannot say 'yes' to God without in some way saying 'no' to ourselves. There is no Magnificat that does not somehow involve the Cross which leads the way to the uplands of God's peace.

Zechariah and Mary in a world of unbelief

Today's gospel (Luke 1: 5-25) relates the story of Zechariah to whom the Angel Gabriel appears as he ministers in the temple. There are two angelic visions in this chapter of Luke: in one, a humble and obscure virgin hears the divine message and speaks her 'yes' that changes history; in the other, a specially chosen priest who offers incense in the temple, hears the divine message, sceptically questions it, and ends up under a curse that leaves him speechless. Who says there is no justice?

How the mighty fall! Minutes before writing this, I was listening to Esther Rantzen on the radio, relating in her warm and friendly tones how, now that she has Stage 4 cancer, she has joined Dignitas and believes fully in the compassionate freedom of being able to end her own life. Rantzen, the social conscience of Britain, voice of the voiceless and champion of the weak, stands now for death. But what has this to do with Zechariah?

Everything. Zechariah is a priest, chosen from among men in the things that pertain to God, as St Paul says in the letter to the Hebrews. At the appointed time, he enters the inner sanctuary of the temple and there performs the ceremony of the offering of incense. His is a ministry of mercy and compassion, interceding for the people. Then, while interceding before the divine presence while the people watch on from outside, Zechariah gives way to his scepticism in the face of God. Zechariah, mediator with God and the most privileged of men, stands now for unbelief.

But, isn't Zechariah the model of reason and good sense (like Rantzen)? Do not humanity and compassion underpin all his difficulties as he faces his angelic visitor? What after all are his objections?

'How can I be sure of this?' he says - an admirably humble response, not wishing to trust in himself... 'I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years' - which seems to show how very prudent Zechariah really was, knowing his limitations and those of his spouse... Are we sure this is not so? 

The modern response to what happens next is easy to imagine. How cruel, it would say, does Gabriel then become? Refusing to have mercy on Zechariah's just fear and ignoring Zechariah's humble admission of weakness, Gabriel brings down a punishment like some appallingly cruel Greek deity. How callous is God who places such burdens on Zechariah when he surely cannot carry them? Such, I imagine, is the compassionate commentary.

But Zechariah's uncertainty does not bespeak humility; it bespeaks complexity. Zechariah, who is supposed to be worthy of his priesthood, is unfamiliar with the divine, possibly through lack of deep prayer. His response to Gabriel is not a sign that he does not trust himself; it is a sign that he is resistant to seeing things from God's perspective. 

Likewise, Zechariah's complaint that he and his wife are too old is the age-old human pretext for not doing what God asks of us. We say we cannot, but we are then usually trying to cross the bridge before we come to it. God will send us what we need in the right moment, and not before. 

Before we enter Christmas, these two poles stretch before us, marking out the tension that rends the world asunder. Zechariah, the mighty priest with a ministry of compassion, who stands before God's presence in the temple, is the model of infidelity and unfaithfulness. Mary in all her obscurity, who runs to her cousin Elizabeth with tales of her joy in God, is the model of constancy and acceptance. Only the priesthood of Jesus - a priesthood he receives thanks to the human nature that comes from Mary's flesh - marries priestly dignity and the perfection of goodness. And its advent in the world is now imminent. 

Elijah in a world of information

Today's brief gospel (Matthew 17: 10-13) is another of those episodes in which the disciples are invited to think a little deeper than the plainly obvious. 

They are indulging in that favourite pastime of some believers to speculate about future prophesies. It is almost always a mistake. Of course there are literal and historical senses to Scripture, as the Chutch teaches, but when the reader treats the Sacred Scriptures like they are no more than a text in the world of information - as if they were a book of recipes or a set of technical instructions- then the reader is likely to bounce off the surface. 

Proof that the Sacred Scriptures are more than mere information lies in the way Jesus speaks about John the Baptist as Elijah. He leaves it to the disciples to work this out. He does not make it clear for them. On most occasions, Jesus does not practise the pedagogy of OFSTED or follow the principles of the Campaign for Plain English. 

Jesus stoops to pick us up in our sorry state of sin, for we are travellers waylaid on our way to Jericho. But one of the challenges of receiving  His mercy is that as He picks us up, we must yield to His mystery; submit not only to the depth of His Truth but also to His way of communicating Himself to us. In this, we are like owls blinking in blinding sunlight, disoriented by the merging of mystery and truth, metaphor and symbol, and by the realities that these things point to. Was John the Baptist Elijah or was Elijah John? Not in any literal sense. But the convergence of these two heroes of faith in Jesus' discourse shows us something of God's mysterious mode of teaching, of inviting us to abandon our prosody and rise to the poetry of the Divine Mysteries. 

People speak these days of love languages, and say that the real lover seeks to understand and communicate in the love language of the other. But God is different. While allowing for our weakness, God's love language is so much deeper and richer than ours because His love is so much richer and deeper than ours. If He stoops a little towards us, it is to make us go further up and further in to the reality that He is. 

It is time to stop speculating and explaining (although these have their moment, of course). In these days before Christmas, it is time to pray for the grace to surrender ourselves to the radiance of His wisdom.

Go home!

 Today’s gospel (Luke 5: 17-26) contains three very simple commands from Jesus: get up, pick up your stretcher, and go home. Jesus is demonstrating to the Pharisees and scribes that He indeed has the power to forgive sins. He does this by miraculously demonstrating His power over nature. But He is not only demonstrating His power. He is also curing a man who has been so helpless, he needed his friends to carry him about on a stretcher.

As almost always in the gospel, however, the physical ailment is a sign and symbol of something deeper. The man’s paralysis is the immobility that comes upon the soul who is immersed in sin, who has lost the ability to discover and seize its own freedom. The man needs a liberator from his sins, just as he needs a liberator from his physical paralysis. Without grace – God’s free intervention – he and we are lost.

But dwell for a moment on the final command: ‘go home’. It is the simplest of orders, and yet it says so much about the sinful condition. To sin is to go away from home; from home and from family, notably our Beloved Father. To be cured of sin through repentance and in the Sacrament of Confession is to set out on the journey home. Home is not only where the heart is, but it is where we belong by providence. Every going out is undertaken in view of a returning home. The world does not, or at least should not, revolve around the office desk or the factory machine, but around the family dinner table where grace and gladness meet.  We are most ourselves when we are set free in the wild adventure of domesticity, rather than competing for the recognition of employers or the admiration of the world at large.

Go home. This is Christ’s agenda.  

Lord, I am not worthy

Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 5-11) reminds us of the origins of words we all say only a few moments before we encounter Jesus in Holy Communion. The dispositions of the centurion would not yet be enough to receive Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. We hope that after this meeting the centurion went on from acts of faith to acts of friendship and love, but we do not know.

Meanwhile, Jesus not only cures his servant but praises the centurion for his faith. We should praise the centurion too for his reverence. For the centurion shows reverence in two ways. The first is that he addresses Jesus respectfully: “Sir” is the English translation of what he says, and he uses this term both times that he addresses our Lord. Formality is now unfashionable; it is especially suspect in a religious context where it is associated with rigidity and coldness. But, as St Paul says, every knee should bow at the name of Jesus. Only a few years back, pious Catholics would bow their heads at the name of Jesus, mirroring a rubric that was embedded in the liturgy. But why should every knee bow to Jesus if bowing the knee (or bowing the head) is an act of cold-hearted prissiness? “Sir”, says the centurion simply, and I imagine he bowed his head when he did so, if not his knee. Would that every communicant were as reverent.

The second act of reverence of the centurion is intimately tied up with his faith. “I am not worthy to have you under my roof,” he says. I am not worthy – words that are only spoken either out of a wrongheaded sense of self-abasement (which is clearly not the case here) or out of an abundant sense of his own position in relation to Jesus. Now, it is possible that the centurion is only observing a social convention, knowing how sniffy the leading Jews were about mixing with sinners. But, Jesus does not smile on such delicatesse; He smiles rather on the man’s belief that He could cure the servant even without seeing him. The centurion’s reverence, therefore, does not come from observing the social custom of the Jews who wished to shun Gentile company; it comes from what must have been a deep sense of Jesus’ power that he could easily have witnessed as Jesus made his progress through the Holy Land. There reverence proceeds from his faith. 

I believe. And if I know myself, I must know myself to be much lower than the power I believe in. And yet – here comes the act that Jesus honours in the centurion – despite it all, I humble myself and ask for His help. If we but had faith, we could move mountains, or perhaps see our servants healed. Or better still, we might glimpse the healing touch of Jesus descend on our own hearts.

Bearing with the mysteries (not baring with)

 Today's gospel (Luke 21: 29-33) contains the conclusion of a long and complex prophecy that Jesus makes as He and that His disciples look upon the temple in Jerusalem. This prophecy cannot be read like a plain text. It has layers and layers of meaning that point not only to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD but also to the end of the world. The question here really is why does Jesus teach us in this way?

People nowadays want everything explaining to them. But the assumption that everything can be explained is already a mistake when it comes to dealing with God. Being – just the very fact of existence - is something of a mystery, and God is being in itself. As we read in the letters of Saint Paul, the mysteries of God are full of light and depth, unfathomable to the human mind. There is no “dummies guide” to the ways of God because in the end the ways of God are not primarily a subject in a curriculum but a path of knowledge and love that leads towards union with Him. When Jesus teaches, He is not downloading the manual; He is literally educating us, i.e. leading us out of ourselves and towards Him.

And if we must be led out of ourselves, we should be ready for the strangeness that that entails. You will know the truth and the truth will make you strange, said American novelist Flannery O'Connor. To embrace the mystery of Jesus’ teaching; to gaze and wonder at things that seem incomprehensible; and not to demand - as if we were at the Heavenly Citizens Advice Bureau - for a full explanation of the terms and conditions in language approved by the Plain English Campaign: these are challenges that we and all our demanding contemporaries can afford to rise to.