Still born or born to freedom?

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be downloaded via this link.

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Tomorrow’s gospel is a repeat of the gospel of the five wise and the five foolish virgins which we reflected on a couple of weeks ago. The lectio for the end of the week, therefore, is taken from today’s gospel concerning the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6: 17-29).

The story is quickly told. John preached against Herod’s marriage to Herodias for she had previously been married to his brother Philip. To placate Herodias, Herod locked John away but punished him no further, knowing him to be a good and holy man. Herodias was not so tolerant, however, and when Herod offered Salome, her daughter, as much as half the kingdom to reward her for her dancing before him and his guests, Herodias suggested Salome ask for the head of John the Baptist from whose mouth came forth the condemnation of Herodias’s preferred lifestyle choices. Checkmate, one might say, against John and Herod. A guard wandered down the many dark steps to John’s dungeon, removed the offending item, and they served it on a dish.

There are so many fascinating figures in this tableau: Herod, the man of power with a tender spot for religion; Salome, the sexualised teenager who was still innocent enough to want to please her mother; Herodias who – as she no doubt told her mother -  only ever wanted to be happy … And John, who came to preach preparation for the passage of the Messiah and who dies now in prison because, some would say, of his inability to wink at a touch of marital irregularity. After all – we heard it in a recent gospel – didn’t Moses permit divorce? The radio phone-ins the next day would have all been about how John, the harsh rigorist, got what was coming his way.

Yet, here is the thing. As much as the figure of John evokes the prophets of the Old Testament, he is no longer looking backwards but now forwards. John’s call is to open the door to a new phase in salvation history in which the sacraments of the Temple and all the intricacies of the Old Law will cede to the new laws of Jesus, the way, the truth and the life. The plan is no longer simply to bless things from the outside, as if the ritual cleansing under the Old Law were ever sufficient. Jesus’ plan is for things to be transformed from the inside out.

Marriage was instituted by God in the beginning; male and female He made them. Jesus comes now to redeem humanity and form with them a new kind of marital bond: Jesus the groom, the Church the bride. In this new age, marriage is no longer just a law of nature, a social arrangement, a romantic adventure, or even a painkiller to cover up our sense of loneliness. And, so, John’s death, far from being unconnected to his vocation of announcing the way of the Lord, is in fact a martyrdom in defence of this new reality: the nuptials of Christ with those He has redeemed. God has called us to something better than a comfortable arrangement and mere companionship. Will we hear the call?

Will Herod? Herod is the archetypal figure of modern man: he hasn’t entirely closed his heart to John’s message – he recognised John as a good and holy man and had not put him to death. So, what is stopping him actually releasing John? Herodias’s displeasure, and no doubt, his own. After Salome’s dance, however, the choice shifts. The choice is no longer whether he will or will not kill John. Now, it is whether he will or will not break a rash promise he should never have made in the first place.

Should Herod hold on to the goodness of John at the risk of losing Herodias and his good name (for what would his guests then think of his rash promise?)? Or does he fulfil a rash promise, retain his comfortable domestic arrangements, and forego the thrill of occasionally hearing John preach like a good’un? If Herod’s life were a TV show, he would undoubtedly have switched off at this point. Yet, there is no escape. Once we have the power of free will, we have its responsibilities also.

It is easy to think of Herod as a distant figure, unconnected to our purer, humbler lives. And yet, his complexity is ours; his rashness is ours; his seductions are ours; his accommodations are ours. The only thing left to decide is whether his choices will be ours also.

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Down in the dungeon, John sits on a damp stone ledge and hears distant footsteps at the top of the long stairwell that leads to his cell. Weeks in prison have given him endless time for uninterrupted thought, away from the crowds who usually besieged him. He likes Herod. He does not like incarceration. Divorce is permitted among the Jews. Is he right to have held Herod to a higher law?

What chance of ever bringing Herodias or Salome to the good if he carries on condemning their domestic arrangements? Herodias deserves to be happy, doesn’t she? She’s a fine woman; an accomplished one even. Salome is a sweet girl really. The footsteps on the stairs are getting closer.

And then, through the ventilation gap in his prison wall, he spies the breaking of the dawn in the east. Herod’s drunken party up above has gone on all night. The dank cell seems suddenly fresher; he hears the stir of a breeze beyond its walls, and suddenly becomes aware of a trickle of water down the wall that summons to his memory another morning not long ago, when he stood in the waters of the Jordan facing His cousin, pouring water on His head, and hearing voices from above.

As he contemplates this inner scene, all the deceitful murmurings of the enemy, the deceiver, cease in his brain, the door swings open, and a guard steps in. But John no longer sees his surroundings; he has made his choices. And at last, he stands, not to defy his executioner but to greet the light that comes from above.

None so blind

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found via this link. 

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 13-22) sees Jesus at His most strident not to say relentless. The trickery of the Pharisees and their sidekicks, the scribes, needs to be called out, and Jesus puts them to a withering analysis, but it is an analysis which is full of spiritual light, for unlike first-century or indeed twenty-first century religious enthusiasts, God does not separate the heart from the mind, nor indeed spirituality from the moral law.

It has become fashionable to talk about the Pharisees as rigorists: those who bang a drum loudly for some value (and who secretly are unfaithful to it). And yet is it not Jesus Himself who tells us that He came not to do away with the Law but to fulfil it, and that not one jot or iota would pass away until all things be fulfilled? Jesus, the merciful rabbi, does not tell the woman taken in adultery not to worry about it, or that He has a moral sticking plaster for her immoral bobo; He says to go and sin no more. So, there is a paradox here, as in so many places in the faith. As one teacher put it to me, Catholics should be tough on principle but easy on people; liberals are easy on principle and tough on people. We might add as a corollary that Pharisees are tough on principle and tough on people. Only, their toughness with regard to themselves involves the evasion and self-justification of those who are spiritually immature. Christ’s remedy for sin reaches right down into the depths of the person; it is not content with surface compliance, and it is revolted as the simulation of rectitude, especially when it hides inner disorder. There is a difference between those who wish to seem and those who wish to be. And while sincerity is not salvation, it is an implicit condition of it; nobody will be able to fake their way into heaven.

And yet the story of the Pharisees is not yet done. Jesus unpicks their pretensions with unrelenting clarity.

First, they make salvation or reconciliation with God impossible, or so difficult it is a cause of discouragement even to the earnest. Here again we meet a paradox, for Jesus Himself says the path to destruction is broad and easy, and yet He promises His friends that He goes to prepare a place for them. We dishonour God to speak as if we’re a dead cert for the everlasting bonfire unless we are extremely lucky (not many people still talk like that but a few do). On the other hand, we also dishonour God equally if our surety of salvation is actually presumptuous, as if our religion is like one of those schools where all get prizes. Last week we read the parable of the king who, do not forget, compelled all-comers into his banquet only for him to eject a man who had no wedding garment. We’re invited to the supper of the Lamb and the door is open, but we cannot take it for granted: God is asking for our all, or all that we can humanly give Him, for in return He will give us Himself and everything else will be added on! Still, as St Paul says, we work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  O Lord, don’t trust Philip, was St Philip Neri’s favourite prayer. For God is not the unreliable partner in the bargain; we are.

Second, Jesus condemns the zealotry of the Pharisees in this gospel. This was not about outward proselytization, for the Jews did not go out to recruit converts; this was about the internal waves of spiritual reform movements (like the Pharisees, or indeed like COLW). There is all the difference in the world, however, between sewing the seed and industrially farming it. A balance is needed here. For several decades, the emphasis has been laid on encouraging the seeds of the Word that are already in hearts and cultures, but the wisdom of one metaphor should not drive out the wisdom of another. If the cockle cannot be uprooted with the wheat, that does not nullify the problem of the thorns and bramble that choke the growth of God’s seed. God does not want recruitment through compulsion, and the deeper our relationship with Him, the more we enjoy freedom from sin, and still the love of God urges us, as St Paul says. The Pharisees were obsessed with all the push factors of religion, while at the same time making these so desperate that few could live up to them. We in contrast must emphasise the pull factors without neglecting the push factors. We might not like to recognise it, but Jesus mentions hell more frequently than He mentions heaven in His preaching. You would not think so today!

The balance is not complicated; Jesus’ last comment on the Pharisees cuts their complicated self-justifying legal arguments to pieces. He is not interested in service through sophistry. Life is complicated, but we cannot avoid the essence of the sometimes-hard choices we need to make. We cannot, like the Pharisees, render the law null through a legal quibble. Where is our sincerity?

The tragedy of the Pharisees is that they knew the Law, and could even identify the greatest commandment, and yet they never for a moment seem to have grasped the passionate love of the Lord for His people nor the implications of that passion for their own path through life. Would that we not share their blindness.

My song is love unknown

And audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 22: 34-40) should be a moment of joy, but casting a long shadow over it is the malice of the Pharisees whose intention is not remotely to discuss the greatest commandment but rather to disconcert Jesus. In this simple exchange we find a gulf between the interlocutors, despite their commonly held religion. Yet as Jesus says elsewhere, judge not according to appearances but according to justice.

On one side of this gulf stand the Pharisees who hold themselves to be the most faithful adherents of the Law. Yet they cannot see the wood for the trees, nor that the Law forbids the malice with which their question is put. They are, in other words, so absorbed in the pursuit of material conformity with the Law that it has become a tool in their hands – a tool for self-aggrandisement and a tool to exercise power over their neighbours, rather than their path towards God. Instead of directing them towards salvation, therefore, the Law condemns their entire modus operandi, and every step entangles them deeper in the mire.

Yet, let us not do as the Pharisees do and consider ourselves above their example. We could very well ask in what ways we are guilty of turning our religion into a means of self-service, rather than the service of God. Do we use it unconsciously to prop up our dissonant needs or wounded sense of self? Do we revel in material conformity with its exacting standards, forgetting that God calls us to a life of outward-turning love, rather than self-admiring perfection? Does it become in us a fashionable fetish, rather than a call to faithfulness? In other words, do we really follow Him, or have we unconsciously erected our own discreet idols in His place? Are we serving our Maker, or are we in some subtle way on the make? Only the quiet contemplation of God can illuminate who and what we are.

Standing on the other side of the gulf from the Pharisees is Jesus who answers their malicious questioning thus: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second commandment follows from it logically: You must love your neighbour as yourself, although as we know, Jesus gives a new commandment at the Last Supper: love one another as I have loved you – a commandment so sublime, we seldom mention it, and rarely if ever obey it.

How different would we be if indeed we followed these two commandments; if the law of our hearts and minds – our inner movements and our very thoughts - was that ray of light that plunges into us from the contemplation of the God of love? When we love something – this is the teaching of those supposedly bone-dry scholastics of the Middle Ages – we become like it. When we love God – truly loving Him above all other things – then that love becomes an ultimate law that reshapes us from the inside, not like a legal regulation; more like a mass of energy that brings other things under its all-powerful influence. When the love of God is our law, we are like planets to His sun.

Yet the idea of likeness is also important, because if in loving God we become like Him, we cannot but then love others, first because He loves them also and, second, because our hearts seek out in them what reminds us of our first love, God. Thus, it is easy to love a saint in whom we easily see God’s reflection, but a saint finds it easy to love the sinner, even the worst. We do not think enough on this implication of the law of love. So tribal do we become in defending our beleaguered patch of ground in this secular world, we forget that the worst among our enemies are the ones who are most deprived of God, and, therefore, the most to be pitied and indeed loved. Like the first law of thermal dynamics, truth is love and love is truth. We love one another because God has commanded it, and, nevertheless, the truth that everyone, even the worst of us, resembles God in some way, can become the cause of our love for them. The greater their fall from the truth of their being, the more they are to be pitied and loved. This is why the shepherd goes out and leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one that is lost.

Where I am, there must my servant be also, said Jesus in the gospel on the feast of St Lawrence. And the gospel of St John allows us to see exactly where Jesus is: for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

And so, the conclusion is clear: we must love even the malicious Pharisees who would cast the shadow of their ill-will across the pastures that might otherwise be lit by the love of God. Only light drives out darkness. Only God is their salvation and ours,

My saviour’s love to me,

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

 

Fear in a handful of dust

And audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be heard here.

Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 16-22) gives us one of the iconic failures among Jesus’ listeners. Here is the rich young man who turned away from the Lord – made Him a refusal of His loving invitation - and, as far as we know, never found his way back. We can but hope of course that he had second thoughts later on, but whether he did or not, we still have lessons to learn from his example.

We should not interpret Jesus’ initial reaction to the young man as hostile; rather, it is rabbinical rhetoric. What good deed must I do? the young man asks, and Jesus replies, There is one alone who is good. This is not just a philosophical statement; it is a provocation – a provocation to open a discussion. He already knows this young man’s mind. Sadly, He finds before Him a youth who is held back by two heavy chains: one is his worldly attachments, and the other is his spiritual attachments.

Wealth is actually relative, like money. It makes no difference to have a lot of money if the currency has collapsed like the Weimar mark after the First World War. In pre-Euro Italy, even a millionaire was not so rare. But clearly, if the currency is solid, money can make all the difference, as much between whether you can heat the house or not, as between whether you drive a vintage Bentley or an old banger. Yet wealth too remains relative, even when money is abundant. There are millionaires whose goods lie useless on the floor when their dopamine levels hit rock bottom. The relish of life has gone, and they look for other rewards; they have been driven there by excess. And there are also poor men whose wealth is in the faces of the passer by, the kindness of strangers, and the beauties that anyone can enjoy at the cost of a stroll in the public gardens.

The wealth of this young man in the gospel is something else, however. His wealth is a bet on the future. Jesus offers him an alternative to the assurances that his current wealth provides for him. But looking into a future of uncertainty alongside the Lord, the youth suddenly seizes up. This pious fellow – we’ll come to this piety in a moment – suffers a reflex action, induced by looking at the horizon Jesus points to. There he was one moment, so nobly debating with the great Rabbi the map of the moral heights, and the next moment he finds himself curling up in a sad ball, hanging on not to the present but to a future he unconsciously believes his current wealth guarantees for him. Jesus’ invitation is not so much to leave wealth behind as to leave behind what the man believes it gives him. Wealth is relative, as I said. But when the young man heard these words, he went away sad. Of course he did. He had never envisaged a future without his wealth, and the prospect Jesus offers induces in him a refusal of its possibilities.

Such is the first heavy chain this young man bears of worldly attachments. But now we come to his second chain: his spiritual attachments. Jesus’ provocative questioning at the beginning is like a warning flag: this young man knows it all but has learned nothing, and Jesus intends to shake him. Not only has he learned it all, but he has mastered likewise the moral law yet in its most superficial patterns of behaviour. We cannot blame him too much for this; Israel seems full of such examples at the time, and Jesus denounces them as hypocrites. Genuine, truthful self-knowledge is essential for us in our relationship with God and to navigate in the world, but this man’s self-image is modelled on norms of skin-deep conformity. The greatest commandment – oddly absent from the list of commandments discussed here – ordered him to unite his heart in love to the Lord his God, but this young man has not sought union but perfection wrongly understood. Thus, he lusts after the appearances of piety without any of their inner life. He holds his religion like he holds his money, the principle and foundation of all his assurances. He holds his religion like a handful of dust, and it escapes his clutches and lies beyond his grasp.

Some might say it would have been better for the young man to be an honest debauchee than a pious fraud. Jesus was cross with the Pharisees but not with the lustful. All the young man’s doctrine and morality were useless to him without the inner reality.

But that would be a hasty judgement; let us not devalue the young man’s fidelity, be it ever so superficial. God judges the heart, but our vices have social consequences too, and such social consequences have long-term spiritual impacts. Honest immorality is a lesser spiritual problem than hypocritical piety, but its impact on others – its capacity to dissolve healthy cultural settings through its lawlessness – can be almost as vicious. In 1968, many a priest and bishop thumbed their noses at Humanae Vitae in sincere revolt, and the Catholic family has paid a terrible price for it ever since. The spirit quickens the letter; it does not render the letter irrelevant.

The young man is like the cynic in Oscar Wilde’s definition: he knows the price of the Scriptures but none of their value. He went away sad because he feared the privation of money. Did he ever consider, as we must, that his own poverty really lay within? 

Blind spots and refusals again

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 3-12) once again offers several mysteries for our contemplation. The Christian laws of marriage, as God intended it from the beginning; the union of the spouses in one flesh; the gift of purity as it is given by God. Yet from a COLW perspective, one sentence stands out amid all the others: that Moses tolerated divorce in the Old Testament because the people of God were so unteachable.

If we think of unteachability as a strictly intellectual limitation, we have not really understood all its implications. Another word for lack of teachability here would be hardness of heart. It was not just that there was a mental blind spot among God’s chosen ones; theirs was a moral refusal to rise to the responsibility enjoined by what God had established from the beginning. In mitigation, we should remember that the age of grace was not yet fully born before Jesus’ death on the Cross.

There is a correlation, therefore, between the higher expectations in the teachings of Jesus and the fulness of grace that His redemption makes available to us. His condescension to our weakness – His mercy on the sinner - is not a ticket for us to wallow in irresponsibility or indulgence. It is a route out of our misery.  But how?

We become more teachable in two ways. First, our minds become more teachable when we allow our imaginations to embrace the breadth of God’s mysteries. In the nighttime discussion with Nicodemus, Jesus leads Nicodemus to see things in new ways. Nicodemus becomes, as it were, a model of teachability, allowing his imagination to become receptive to things beyond his normal ken. It is not that he is a passive listener, far from it; rather, he is an attentive questioner, and Jesus unfolds for him not only the mysteries of the past, but the promise of the new revelation that His own coming signifies. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our normally limited philosophies. In an age when our visions have become narrowed to the breadth of a mobile device, our minds and our Christian imaginations need to find their way back to the soaring breadth and height that our medieval cathedrals still symbolise for us. Like Dostoevsky said of Russia, we need to sit at the feet of Christ again and learn his gospel.

Yet, the second way we become more teachable is through our gradual surrender to the Father’s forming action, shaping now not only our minds but our hearts through His grace, enabling our minds to rise to the mysteries that He reveals and strengthening our wills to choose the responsibilities these mysteries call us to.

Our greatest tragedy is sin unrepented, but after that comes this tragedy of unteachability which stunts and limits us, withers God’s work, and renders us partially sterile, making us spiritual eunuchs by our own childish hands.

Who will free me from the body of this death, says St Paul – the blind spots and refusals that mar the work of God in us? Thanks be to God – He concludes - who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Mary, bringer of joy

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 39-56) tells us more about the Blessed Mother than almost any other part of Sacred Scripture. Bethlehem means in Hebrew ‘House of Bread’, but before Bethlehem, Mary was the House of the Bread who had come down from heaven following the Annunciation, Mary’s original joy. He is present in this gospel in mysterious and perfectly Eucharistic silence. Mary’s journey to the hill country of Judah in today’s gospel is, as it were, the first Eucharistic procession in history, and like the coming of the Eucharist, Mary’s arrival brings joy to Elizabeth and to John.

To Elizabeth first – for like her child, she too was filled in this moment with the Holy Spirit. Some Christians appear to think of Mary as a baby machine for the incarnation, but not Elizabeth who recognises Mary’s blessing for what it is: the greatest dignity ever accorded any human being. Mary’s holiness is crowned by her union and cooperation with God (Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it), but her dignity and holiness are rooted in her divine motherhood, for her preservation from sin was a gift that made possible her vocation. Hence, Elizabeth’s question: why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? When the Litany of Loretto calls Mary cause of our joy, it is evoking this very moment of encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, and proposing it as the sign for our encounter with Mary, our mother and our model. If Mary is not the cause of our joy, we have to question whether we have really understood what she brings, for she brings this joy not just to Elizabeth but to succeeding generations also…

Beginning with John of course, Jesus’ cousin - who would be known as John the Baptist and who would lay down his life in defence of the sanctity of marriage, the social symbol of the union of Jesus with His Church. Any woman who has carried a child could tells us what it is like to be booted in the guts by an unborn infant, but the commentators of the gospel have long seen this as the moment in which John was himself filled with the Holy Spirit, like his mother Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the wife of a priest, speaks from the depths of the Old Testament, like Esther, Ruth, or perhaps more like Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel whose joy, like Mary’s, was to say: Here I am Lord: your servant is listening – for obedience comes from the Latin obedire which is to listen or pay attention. But the obedient John speaks here also, in the only way an unborn child can speak, and in speaking thus, articulates the then silent cry of all those future generations who would call Mary blessed later on.   

 And then in the hearing of both Elizabeth and John, Mary’s hymn of joy unfolds, singing the greatness of God, His condescension to her, her future glory, God’s mastery of human affairs and history, and His faithfulness to those He promised mercy and forgiveness. For Mary knew a kind of forgiveness or at least salvation, not for personal or original sin but in a preventative sense, for she too needed a redeemer whose merits would reach back to her own conception and exclude her from the effects of the fall of Man.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth thereafter. May she stay with every one of us, bring us joy today, and travel with us, no longer towards the hills of the earthly Judah, but on our journey in this life towards the eternal hills.

O Mary, teach us always to say ‘yes’ to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our lives.

Amen.  

The joy behind the sadness

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be downloaded through this link.

Today’s gospel (Matthew 17: 22-27) shows the disciples once again giving way to those thoughts that, as Jesus says, are of man, not of God. How crushing for men who fancied themselves the future princes of Jesus’ kingdom! In the first part of this gospel, Jesus announces to them His approaching suffering and His victory over death: He foresees that He will be handed over into the power of men and be put to death, but thereafter – by some unutterable marvel – He would return to life. And the reaction of the disciples? A great sadness came over them. Let us leave aside that part of the gospel about the half shekel and focus rather on this sadness of the disciples.

What a contrast from their later companion St Paul who commands Christians to rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice. Not only was the Lord near to the disciples, He was there in their very presence. And yet they were sad. Whence comes their sadness and whence comes ours?

Joy is one of the qualities of love, alongside mercy and peace. When it is lost, it may be because we are deprived of the thing that we love. We lose a parent or perhaps we lose a child, and we grieve for what was and for what might have been. It is in such moments that our fiat in sorrow in COLW becomes such a familiar feature of our inner landscape.

The sadness of the disciples is of another kind, however. It is true that they do not understand the future story about His death and resurrection that Jesus has just told them. Yet more than that, they do not yet grasp the paradox that was at the heart of the gospel on Saturday: that death is the condition of life. They do not understand yet that in surrendering to the Father’s forming action – from which path even Jesus could not deviate, despite His prayer in Gethsemane – the fiat in sorrow always contains in it the seeds of a fiat in joy. We do not suffer in vain, nor do we suffer alone. Again, returning to the gospel of Saturday, wherever I am, my servant will be there too. We are accustomed to think of suffering as a lonely place. But if we believed the words of Jesus, our sufferings would be for us a sign of His presence, and proof – not that we can command it – that He is making us His companion.

So, why cannot the disciples understand this at this point? It may be for two reasons – two reasons that may also apply to us.

First, they may not understand because they simply do not think like that – their thoughts are of man, not of God, to use again Jesus’ words. It is a logical blind spot. It makes no sense. It is a blank on their internal map. Victory does not emerge from defeat; they believe this, bizarrely, despite their knowledge of the history of Israel where exile and return or even death and resurrection underpin the story of God’s people.

Second – and perhaps this tends to be more our case – even if they have understood the logic, they have not internalised its consequences for themselves. Or rather, they have not yet fully surrendered to the Father’s forming action, preferring His ways to their own, choosing His priorities over theirs, putting His glory first rather than their satisfactions. In the previous chapter of St Matthew, the newly appointed first pope had earned himself a scolding for thinking that he could persuade Jesus to abandon His march towards death and suffering. And yet here were the disciples, witnesses of Jesus’ astonishing ministry of truth and liberation, once again downcast at the sad prospect of His foretold trials. Now, it is not a blind spot; it is a refusal of the path.

Is every suffering – or sadness in the case of the disciples - a refusal of the path? That cannot be the case. Jesus wept, Mary faced seven sorrows, and neither refused God anything. But sadness or suffering that will not see or look for its companion future joy? That may indeed be a refusal. The disciples’ refusal is evident since, as the gospel says, their sadness overcame them. And yet, if they had only raised their eyes again and looked at the last line of Jesus’ prophecy, they would have glimpsed the rising light of love, the joyful assurance of His presence with all His servants, that flickers in expectation, even behind the horizon of the darkness of God’s death. 

Dying thus around us every day

For an audio file of today's gospel and blog, follow this link.

Today's gospel (John 12: 24-26) evokes a gospel paradox that is easy to say and impossible (without His grace) to live by: that death is the condition of life. 

We do not believe it. The confidence of our belief in the desirable life of the grain cannot be overstated. And yet it fails Jesus' test for life: that anyone who loves his life will lose it.

This is not the cosy Jesus, beloved of the balloon-and-banjo liturgists. But it is the Jesus of the gospel. What's more, it is the Jesus of the call to the fulness of life and love, a call that our COLW charism reminds us of constantly. 

So, in this light the gospel yields up more paradoxes. Death is the condition of life, and keeping our lives for eternity requires us to hate them in this world. Is this hyperbole, or is Jesus merely another extremist who has not understood the supreme power of self-interest?

The question would be blasphemous if it wasn't rhetorical. Jesus came to give life. Indeed, He is the life He came to give. But He gives it only at the cost of the death of the power of self-interest. Two loves have built two cities, says St Augustine. We need to choose.

And, yes, of course His language is beset with rabbinical hyperbole. He does not mean that we should hate our lives which are His gift but rather hate everything in them that blocks our union with Him. But the end result is no hyperbole.  The rich harvest which awaits the death of self-interest is precisely the life and love we are called to live in this world and into eternity.  

Yet there remains the in-between moment; the time when the grain is dying; the moment when we must distinguish what to hate and what not to hate in our lives; the careful discernment of exactly which limb to offer the executioner first. 

It is possible that as St Lawrence lay smouldering on his gridiron, he threw back his head, smiled, and said: "This is the life."  But between such moments, when his whole being was taken in the power of the gifts of the Holy Spirit - the same gifts we possess but do not direct - Lawrence had the chance to observe his own powerlessness, his fragility before the pain, to recall his past failings, and to feel his utterly human panic, the firing of the fight-or-flight instinct, at the approaching nemesis. Then, perhaps, he would have remembered these words of Jesus: "If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too."

Which should be a comfort (and yet we never think of it). In the depths of our suffering - whether from without or from within - Jesus has always been there first as a pioneer, a path finder before we even knew we were walking the path, to work His miracle of reborn life. "Does He know what I suffer?" we might ask. To which He surely answers: "I walked that path first and, wherever I am, my servant must be there too."

If the grain dies, it yields a rich harvest. Let it be done unto us, according to His word.

Fools rush in

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Today’s gospel of the wise and foolish virgins or bridesmaids (Matthew 25: 1-13) marks the feast of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Carmelite, philosopher, and victim of Auschwitz. It is easy to see why. Nevertheless, the wise and the foolish virgins are not so clearly distinguished as in the parable. Jesus makes it easy for us by labelling some of them wise and some of them foolish, but what if He had not? What if we had to distinguish the wisdom and the foolishness for ourselves?

If we did not know the end of the parable – if we had to write it ourselves – who would enter the banquet? Some might imagine, for example, that the foolish virgins (in Jesus’ eyes) were in fact the wise ones and that the wise ones (in Jesus’ eyes) were nothing less than foolish. How is that? In an Olympian spirit, let’s call them Team F (the foolish ones) and Team W (the wise ones) and see how they fare.

First, Team F brought no oil with them. Well, of course not. Jesus had bid them consider the lilies of the field who neither sow nor reap. Why take additional oil, they might have said, when Jesus has told us not to store things up like the rich fool in Luke chapter 12?

Moreover, is Team W, who take extra oil, really thinking about the bridegroom? They are plotting and planning the material ‘what ifs’ of life, unlike Team F who only have eyes for the bridegroom. Team W seem like the Marthas of this life, whereas Team F seem like the Marys.

Lastly, Team F expect the necessities from the hands of others, as Jesus bids the 72 disciples whom He sends out on mission in Luke chapter 10; surely if a worker deserves his wages, so too does a bridesmaid. Team W in contrast disobey Jesus’ command during the Sermon on the Mount that if someone asks for your shirt (or your oil), give them your cloak as well…

Does Jesus have this all wrong then? Does He confuse the wise and the foolish virgins? Why does Jesus praise Team W who depend on themselves, who calculate, and who refuse to share? Why is it Team W who enter the wedding celebrations while Team F - who did not store things up, refused to plot, and only begged for what they needed - were excluded?

The answer perhaps lies in the fact that all the bridesmaids were there for the mission. It is not that Team W were being calculating and selfish. Team W are the team that had their eyes fixed on the purpose of their role; not simply on themselves. They understood they were part of a bigger scheme; that their service was not just about their own perfection but about how they disposed all things for the service of the bridegroom. 

Team F in contrast could not see beyond the achievement of being named as bridesmaids. They had made it, so to speak, and they became complacent. All their superficial obedience to Jesus’ commands was out of context. When Team W calculated about the oil, it was not due to personal anxiety; it was the wisdom of stewardship applied to their role. If their lights went out, it was not that they had to sit in darkness; it was rather that the bridegroom’s entry and feasting would be threatened with darkness. The same applied to their refusal to share their oil. It was not theirs to share but the bridegroom's.

Team F knew what they had to do up to a point, but Team W knew what they were for. And because they knew what they were for, they were not focused on themselves but on the carrying out of their mission. Not all those who say, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus’ conclusion to this parable is, nevertheless, a warning. Stay awake! He admonishes all. The success of Team W is not really to their credit; like Team F they fell asleep on the job. Nobody can afford to be complacent, not the wisest among us.

The virtues of a lonely place

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 14: 13-21) contains two mysteries that are intimate parts of our journey back to God. The most obvious mystery is that of the Holy Eucharist, foreshadowed in this extract of the gospel in the distribution of bread and fish to the masses; not bread alone (anticipating the Eucharistic symbolism) but fish also (the sign of the reality of His flesh in the Eucharistic banquet). The fragments rained down upon the crowd like manna in the desert, or like the snowflakes on the Esquiline Hill in Rome on the night of 5^th August 352 when, according to legend, a miraculous snowfall marked the area where the Virgin Mother wished a church to be built in her honour. It does not matter whether we accept the legend - I do - so much as that we believe in miracles and the miraculous. The Eucharist is a miracle, our daily miracle, and would that we honoured its mystery like the angels do.

The other mystery in today’s gospel is more easily passed over, but while it is of a lesser kind than that of the Holy Eucharist, it is, nevertheless, fundamental to our journey:

When Jesus received the news of John the Baptist’s death, He withdrew by boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves.

A whole world of wisdom is contained in this simple line. Let us be whimsical for a moment. Did it never cross Jesus’ mind on hearing of the death of John that He should check his Twitter feed or see what they were saying about it on Instagram? Could He not perhaps have tuned into the BBC on the apostolic radio, that being the only known way of discovering the truth of events in the Middle East?

Jesus’ instinct on hearing of John’s death is otherwise: He withdraws to a lonely place. He did not interact; as we might say nowadays, He self-isolated. The “welcoming” of others has been turned into such a Christian arch-virtue nowadays that the virtue of recollection seems rather to be suspiciously self-centred. If you hang your head in prayer after Mass, you will sometimes feel the eyes of disapproval around you, wondering at your lack of Christian charity in failing to indulge in a session of mutual hilarity, almost before the organ’s last notes have died away. Here in the gospel, Jesus’ action following John’s death is revelatory.

He does not react. He does not open wide His windows to the gales of anger and indignation that must have blown among John’s many followers. The hurricanes of hate had no opportunity to shatter the shutters of His heart and mind with their torrent of words. He did not allow them to. The anger of idiots fills the world, wrote the French novelist Georges Bernanos repeatedly and perhaps unkindly in the 1930s. He feared what was coming because of such anger. And he was right.

Were talk and dialogue not necessary in such a moment? Perhaps. But Jesus’ example is firstly one of steadying His own ship. John was His cousin, and if He wept over the death of Lazarus His friend, can we not imagine that He wept over John’s death also? In the Jesus who boards a boat, intending to retire to a lonely place, we find an example of One who wishes to give Himself time to embrace the Father’s forming action that now deprives Him of his Herald and Prophet. His own journey had taken another major step forward to its goal of Calvary, and recollection was needed.

At least it was His intention to withdraw to a lonely place. His time on the boat would have to suffice because, as soon as He stepped ashore, the crowds were around Him again: and he took pity on them and healed their sick. Well, of course, He was God; His action was an example for us, not a necessity for Himself. Nevertheless, note well His intention: His heart longed for the lonely place where He could be alone with God. Only from that cell of recollected self-knowledge where we can acknowledge our utter dependence on Him, can we go out to those who need our pity and our service.  All our pity and service will avail them little if we have launched ourselves into action without knowing who He is and who we truly are.

Before the mission come contemplation and self-knowledge. This is Jesus’s path; it must be ours.   

The one we would know yet

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 54-58) tells us something about how focused God is on relationship with us. As happy as He is in Himself, it is in the nature of goodness to share itself, and thus He turns His eye of eternal love on us, His new creation. And, thus, His eye remained, even after we had sinned:

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

says Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure (Act 2: 2).

It is this freedom of God’s salvation that determines the fact that Jesus will not work miracles because of their lack of faith - the lack of faith of the other Nazarenes. God is not a customer for our affection. He is not a merchant in search of business. He offers His gifts freely and keeps no shop. He is not ‘in trade’.

We can wonder at why those in Nazareth lacked faith. Were these not the people who knew Him best, and to love Him, was it not enough merely to know Him? They were astonished at His teaching, but that was as far as they were ready to bestir themselves. The Nazarenes are an example of the easy comforts of the shallows – the dangerous indolence of a life that excuses itself from the adventures of contemplation. They were complacent in a familiarity that they had not even noticed was beginning to hang from the walls of Israel like worn out wallpaper. Cast out into the deep, says Jesus to the disciples in Luke 5:4. Cast out into the deep.

We cast out into the deep precisely through faith which makes us ready to face the strangely disconcerting attentions of a God who not only offers us salvation freely but who wants us to learn to accept His gifts. He offers us the feast, but He also helps us to the table and to eat. And yet He does not want our enthusiasm.

At the opposite end of the scale from the indifference of Nazareth comes the enthusiasm of the crowds who wanted to make Him king after He fed them miraculously. These had had their physical hunger satisfied and responded with an enthusiasm that was wholly of this world. Yet, oddly, perhaps, this too was a lack of faith, averse to the miraculous work of God. While indifference fosters no relationship, enthusiasm fosters a self-centred relationship. While the indifferent yawn and return to their indulgences, the enthusiasts clamour and unwittingly remake God in their own image. They did not want to make Jesus king of their hearts but to have him strike down their Roman overlords. Instead of opening up to the power of the Holy Spirit, they were indulging in a human power grab.

And lest we imagine that we would not stoop so low ourselves, we only need to reflect that it is too easy to let our unconscious, dissonant needs - those motives we often only see in the rear-view mirror of reflection -  leverage the good that God would work in us into our service instead of His. God has no need for our enthusiasm and satisfaction. He is calling us to the fullness of life and love that surpasses our imaginations; not to a cheap starring role in The Me Show.

Jesus did not work many miracles in Nazareth because of their lack of faith, but he did work some: probably miracles of nature, undoubtedly miracles of grace. And they are there for those who put aside human astonishment and the comforts of self-centred familiarity in order to encounter the God they are yet to know.