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.

Mastery of our souls

Today’s gospel (5: 27-32) is a reminder for us that we must always read the Sacred Scriptures with a wise eye and an ear firmly on Tradition. On the one hand, today’s gospel challenges us with teachings that are especially unpopular today, the literal sense of which some would like to deny; on the other hand, Jesus’ language is savage and apparently impossible to fulfil. How can we make sense of such tensions?

Jesus is not just any teacher; He is the Teacher, and He comes to share with us the revelation of the Father’s love. The moral laws which He teaches in this gospel - on purity of heart and mind, and on marriage as a life-long bond – are an expression of His wisdom. As He explains elsewhere, ‘in the beginning’, He made them male and female to be joined together for life.  

Yet, why does He give us these teachings on marriage and purity of heart? Simply because God wants us to be transformed by His life entirely, from our grandest actions to our most secret thoughts. Custody of the mind and heart, as Jesus teaches here, is not a nicety. It is an alignment of our inner appetites with the good things of God, a turning away from self-satisfaction to the fulfilment of free hearts, buoyed up by the Father’s love. The same holds true for life-long marriage. Jesus came to rescue all the ruins of life through His grace. Every sinner has a future, and every saint has a past; so says the ancient wisdom. Every Christian is bound by the law of dying-to-self so as to live to God. Even every happy marriage includes such dying-to-self as well, because true fulfilment emerges from self-gift rather than from self-pursuit. Who knows how many rocky marriages could have been saved had both partners known and listened to such a teaching? If we only stop seeking ourselves for a moment, what possibilities might we discover that come within our reach? The statistics bear this out; second marriages are more likely to fail than first marriages, and things get even worse for third and fourth marriages. People don’t become better judges of these things by throwing their spouses away; generally, they become worse. Some situations cannot be saved of course, but then the marriage bond live on, held in the merciful palm of Jesus to whom the promises were said in the first instance. For what is a vow but words we say to God?

Then comes the second part of this gospel: Jesus’ command to avoid sin at all costs. Here, as I said above, is where we need Tradition to help us: sometimes Jesus speaks in hyperbole. We may not sever our hands nor pluck out our eyes, even to avoid sin, so why does Jesus say this? Because He is using the rhetoric of a communicator who knows His words will not be taken literally: He is simply underlining His point! He does not mean we should harm ourselves; merely that we should do all we can to save ourselves from sin. What this means for each individual will differ. For some, it might mean never setting foot in a pub again; for another, it could mean getting rid of the TV. Translating it into one of today’s scenarios, if thy screen offends thee, put it in the bin! Better to enter eternity without a social media presence than to risk one’s soul for a little cheap digital dopamine shot.

Jesus, be master of our souls, for we cannot be heroes, nor yet be wise, without your all-healing grace.

Of persecution and pearls

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

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

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

Insofar as persecution takes our joy and robs us of peace, perhaps that is the measure of how far we have to go yet before we are truly united to Him; of how much we must long and pray for that union with him. If suffering bends us all out of shape and traumatises us, perhaps that is because we are not yet fully surrendered to God and to the Father’s forming action. We may think we love the people around us, but the people we really love are those we refuse to be separated from, despite our suffering, despite what their love costs us. It is not the suffering that reveals who we are, therefore, but the steadiness of our hearts when the suffering comes: grace and joy under pressure, as we said in the last gospel reflection.

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

But he had found the pearl of great price. The questions of those around him made no sense. The pearl - a symbol of union with God - was now, he realised, everything he could ever desire or need in this world. 

The man was standing on a different horizon. 

And so must we.

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

Wisdom, courage and finally joy

Todays gospel (Mark 12:1-12) should be a source of wisdom and courage for the followers of Jesus. 

Wisdom and courage both consist in this: that the way of Christ is to rise in God's power after human defeat. This dynamic is at the heart of the parable Jesus relates of the man who plants a vineyard but whose tenants kill or beat all those who come to press the rights of the vineyard owner. Just as God sent the prophets to those who tended the vineyard of Israel, so the owner of this vineyard sent his representatives who were rejected one after one. In the end, they will not even accept his son...

Jesus of course tries to build bridges and so should we, but as this parable suggests, and as they say these days, the haters gonna hate. Sometimes we cannot save our friendship with God and our friendship with others: which should prevail? In the end fidelity to God is our compass, not bridge building with our neighbours, and when those we build bridges with cannot bear our friendship with God, they are only following the pattern of the vineyard's tenants. And what if our fidelity to God costs us dearly? What if it gets us thrashed or killed? Or cancelled and shunned? What if it leaves our credibility in tatters? Should we do a deal with the tenants so they leave us alone? Should we barter our fidelity for peace? Well, of course, we should not appoint ourselves as martyrs. God will choose the time for us. Here is where the wisdom lies: we think peace lies beyond cordial negotiations, but perhaps it only lies beyond our defeat. For only in defeat can God show us the power of His resurrection. Only in the defeat of our self sufficiency can God show us that, all along, He intended to be our sufficiency: we just could not see it.

And so here comes the courage. For it is one thing to acknowledge the wisdom of God in the vineyard but it is quite another to accept its logic for us. How do we surrender to the Father's forming action when that forming action delivers us up to a thrashing by the tenants or even some kind of death: death of friendships, death of reputation, or death of our human resourcefulness? Here too is where we need to say a fiat in sorrow, but even the fiat in sorrow builds on the fiat in joy, for sorrow will always be passing, a pure accident in our earthly transit, but joy, mercy and peace, the fruits of love, will be our song forever with God if only we are faithful to Him. Easter Sunday always lies beyond Good Friday.

Ernest Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. Perhaps the COLW definition should be grace and joy under pressure. 

This was the Lord's doing

And it is wonderful to see.