Faith from fury

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link. 

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Today’s gospel (Luke 7:1-10) is full of movement. There is the movement of the Jewish elders who bring to Jesus the message from a Roman centurion that his servant is in need of healing. There is Jesus’ movement, walking in the direction of the centurion’s residence. There is the movement of the belated messengers, who intercept Jesus on the way with a message whose sentiments so inspired the early Church that they became an integral part of the Eucharistic liturgy: I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof . And indeed, the movement of Jesus’ heart, elated by the faith of this gentile. All these movements are in a way redolent of the movement that the centurion himself goes through as he passes from his Roman religion to faith in the living Christ.

When he begins that journey, his religion is one of exchange and trade, like so many religions in which people entered into a kind of commercial arrangement with the gods. Before we get too snooty about such a pragmatic form of religion, we should of course recall that we are all too prone, consciously or unconsciously, to indulge in our own kind of trade with God – for what we will or will not do for Him if He does this or that for us. Accordingly, it is entirely possible that the centurion’s building of the local synagogue was done in this frame of mind, a barter with the local deity, although of course it is also possible that paying for the synagogue to be built was a hearts-and-minds operation – a Roman way of trading for the goodwill of the local people. One cannot always rule over others simply by force.

So, how, we wonder, did his journey in faith begin? Did he find in his trade with Jupiter and Mars some kind of preparation for the gospel? Did the bartering of slaughtered animals and grains of incense with the gods of the Roman imagination bring him, as it were, some sense of the God who really did exist? Some say that all religions are a path to God but in the case of this Roman centurion, it is his military experience that provided a pattern through which he could understand the empire of the God of all gods. For he understood authority like an officer who says ‘go’ to one and he goes: the docility of lower powers to higher powers. This was the message that was brought to Jesus by the second group of emissaries the centurion sent, probably after pacing the floor of his house wondering how his first message would be received. If, at the beginning of this faith journey, he was still remotely interested in the free trade of favours between the heavens and the earth, as its conclusion approached, he was persuaded by a faith that had given birth to humility, to a very un-Roman sense of indignity: Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, nor indeed even to loosen the strap of His sandal.

The importance of the centurion in a theological sense is that he was a gentile. The centurion foreshadows the fact that the terms of the new covenant that Jesus was about to write in His blood would also encompass the Roman world and beyond. But such theology holds the deepest spiritual significance for us because this Jesus, who brings peace and justice but not as the world dreams of them – indeed, not really as any other religion dreams of them – this Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. It was not by becoming more deeply pious within the frame of his Roman religion that the centurion approached God, although his Roman sense of order and indeed virtue perhaps placed him and others a step ahead of some cultures. The seeds of the Word fall where they will, even among the violent structures of a humanly almighty military power. Jesus rejected the advances of Herod Antipas and tongue lashed the Pharisees, but he welcomed two sets of messengers from a bloody Roman occupier. In this gospel, we see more faith in Jesus emerging paradoxically from a culture of furious force and cruelty than from all the pompous pieties and deceptive doctrines of a thousand panjandrums. Our centurion glimpsed the kingship of Christ through the machinery of an Empire that the centurion had thought was above all others.

O Mary, teach us to say ‘yes’ with the centurion to the empire of Jesus, the reign of the Father and the Spirit with Him, over our hearts, our community, and our country.

 

 

Lord, that I may see

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Lord, that I may see

In today’s gospel (Luke 6: 39-42), Jesus simply offers His disciples teaching, and it is a teaching all about vision: moral vision by which we guide others and inner vision by which we know ourselves.

The former depends to a great extent on the latter. Who is the person who sees a splinter in the eye of another but has not noticed the plank in his own? It is every one of us! We do not automatically see ourselves truthfully; our wills, our appetites, and our attachments will not permit it. Solzhenitsyn said pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, but he could easily have called it self-love: the need to take satisfaction in our own self image, a need that is sometimes countered only by the opposite vice of self-hatred or abasement, as if we were not lovable at all. The truthful mind breathes the oxygen of reality in for all breath is somehow redolent of the Spirit of truth, the giver of life; the untruthful mind – the self-serving mind – breathes in the carbon monoxide of self-deceit and its senses slowly dim to uselessness. The truth of who we are and how we stand before God underpins our path back to Him, and as we come to know Him better, we know ourselves also better. Lack of self-knowledge is no virtue in His children.

Indeed, lack of that inner vision is potentially a catastrophe for others – for those we go out to and those we are responsible for. In Jesus’ parable, the blind cannot lead the blind. The lack of self-knowledge – the plank in one’s own eye – is a barrier to seeing the splinter in our brother’s eye. Those who learn from us are dependent on us to illuminate the path before them, for, as Jesus says, the pupil will be like his master.

Ultimately, charity begins at home, and mission begins with contemplation of God, for what truthful inner vision of ourselves can there really be if we do not see ourselves with God’s eyes or in His light? Through faith we know God, but its ambient light tells us who we are, as a species and as individuals. Knowledge without self-knowledge looks too much like a grab for power over what is around us, and perhaps even over others. If, as in Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, we too are

Here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

we must turn again towards to the source of all light and vision who illumines every person who comes into the world.

 

Stretch forth your hand

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Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 6-11) recounts an apparently brief miracle – the healing of a man with a withered hand – but on reflection this story has the potential to cut deeply, like all the events in the life of Jesus.

One Sabbath, Jesus entered a synagogue and began to teach. Among His listeners were Pharisees watching to see if He would heal on the Sabbath – for not even God’s miracles are holy enough to pass the test set by the Pharisees’ most sacred observances. Also among Jesus’ listeners was a man with a withered hand, a genetic condition or possibly one caused by infant paralysis in which the muscles of the hand are shrunken. Jesus called the man to the middle of the room and then began questioning his Pharisee observers about whether it was lawful to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath. He answered their speechless response by bidding the man to stretch out his hand which, in the moment, was cured. The Pharisees, rather than looking to the light, turned to their own black hearts for counsel on how to deal with Jesus.

We have reflected much on the Pharisees over the summer, but what of this man with a withered hand? All the physical cures of the gospel betoken a spiritual reality, as was obvious from the healing of the deaf man yesterday. The blind see, the dumb speak, the lame walk: in all these physical transformations there is a spiritual significance. The same can also be said of this cure of the man with a withered hand.

Jesus’ first commands to the man are Stand up!  and Come out into the middle. For the man was hidden in the congregation, and his arm was possibly covered up with sleeves a little longer than usual. We are now so used to people wanting to be out and proud about all manner of things that we are less aware of the sense of shame or reticence that those with disabilities carry, even today. Why does Jesus call the man out in this way? Is He unfeeling towards the man’s shame? Perhaps Jesus seeks less to expose the man, than to invite him towards simplicity.

For hiding away can often be a sign of complexity; not of wanting to be unnoticed like the saints, but of not wanting to be seen, of proceeding through life masked. We all put on disguises, not perhaps to cover withered hands, but to cover our withered sentiments, our hostilities, our immaturities, and our vulnerabilities. We often do so because of fear for we can all fall victim to what is called the looking-glass self: I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

And, so Jesus bids us rise alongside the man with the withered hand: Stand up! And then, Come out into the middle, not for us to be ostentatious, as at some evangelist rally, but rather to shed the burden, not to say the distortion, of what we imagine others think of us. Our imaginings of the imaginings of others are as near certainly useless as a freshly bought Lotto ticket. But regardless of their accuracy, our true reality is not who we are in the eyes of others; it is who we are in the eyes of God. Our true failure is not how we appear to our disadvantage in their eyes; it is how far short we fall of God’s dream for us. Many years ago, a confessor advised me to confess my sins as God sees them; for it is only this light of God’s eternity that judges things justly. Shame can be useful but only if it brings us back to a sense of ourselves; not if it invites us towards the kind of hypocrisy practised by those holier-than-God pious frauds, the Pharisees.

Then comes Jesus’ final command to the man with the withered hand: Stretch out your hand. In commanding him so, Jesus might otherwise have said to him: Be who you are. He says the same to us. Stretch out your hand, for if we do this in union with Him – united to Him by every yes we try to say to the Father - then it is not we who stretch out a hand, but Jesus who does so. Stretch out your hand means Be my servant in all simplicity. For it is only by Jesus’ power that the man stretches it forth. Who knows how many times he had sat in his house, hidden from the eyes of others, bemoaning his inability, powerlessly imagining the limb as fresh and strong as a healthy hand. Now it becomes so, not by his own power but by the power of Jesus. So may we all be transformed.

For Jesus not only heals the man’s withered hand; He transforms his withered life, as He transforms us in His power. But first, we must shed our complexity, stand boldly in what we wrongly imagine is a cloud of human shame, and step forth into the middle where we can not only see what we currently are, but glean an inkling of what we might be – God’s dream for us – if only we can put our hand in His.

The paradox of joy and grief

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Today's gospel (Luke 5: 33-39) takes us back to reflections we made on Mark 2: 18-22 from January this year. Some of Jesus' critics question why his disciples do not fast, and Jesus tells them that as long as the disciples are with the Bridegroom, it is not fitting that they fast ... but that a time for fasting will come. It is probably worth noting that while penance is a deeply unfashionable not to say enduringly unpleasant feature of our religion, it is one which comes from the Lord himself. As he says elsewhere, “Unless you do penance, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13: 5).” We can only embrace penance, however, out of love. Penance is a gift as much as joy is.

But let us dwell on the paradox here. We are the disciples insofar as we dwell with the Bridegroom, and happily we always dwell with the Bridegroom as long as we do not lose Him through mortal sin. Jesus Himself tells us that He and the Father (and, thereby, necessarily the Spirit also) dwell in the souls of those who love Him. What is eternal life except to dwell with Him? In this limited sense, we already hold eternal life in our hands. 

From this perspective, our horizons should be different from those of other human beings. We walk with another compass and guide ourselves by another map. In the final analysis, a soul living the Christian life is held in God's almighty embrace of love and returns that embrace to the God who has saved them. In the cell of the soul, our faith can be filled with the power of His presence. Here I am, Lord, we say. Here I am, love, He replies.

But here comes the paradox. While in one way we are with the Bridegroom, in another way we are still wayfarers on our journey towards the wedding. While He dwells in our souls, our attention and our hearts are constantly surrounded by the things of this world, and being the fallen creatures we are, our minds and hearts too often seek their happiness there. And we are fallen creatures! If any man thinks he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says Saint Paul. The good that we wish to do, we do not, while the evil we would avoid we sometimes do (again St Paul who is not letting us slackers off the hook!). Actually, the same wisdom about the fallibility of human nature can be found in the writers of classical antiquity. It was the poet Ovid who wrote:

I see and approve the better things,

But the worse things I follow.

Like all the paradoxes in our religion, we have to hold these two things together: that we are with the Bridegroom in the cell of our souls, but yet not with Him and on the journey. So we can rejoice because we dwell with the Bridegroom. But we should mourn because we are sinners and we need to do penance, not only to train our wills in some ascetic sense, but to share in the Bridegroom’s sufferings, to follow Him on His path, and so to help make reparation for our sins - to fill up in our bodies the sufferings wanting to the passion of Christ, as St Paul tells the Colossians. This is the new wine that is poured now into the new skins of the New Law; we do penance as in the Old Testament, but by the grace of our Saviour our suffering is now elevated into an action with and in Christ for whom we become a new instrument of His incarnation.

Those who forget either end of this paradox are in trouble. If we lose hold of the necessity of living joyfully in our hearts with the Bridegroom, we risk becoming a grim burden to ourselves (and others) for nothing alleviates the heavy atmosphere in which our hearts then live. If we lose hold of the necessity of penance, however, we become doe-eyed religious narcissists who never even think to darken the door of the confessional or make the least sacrifice for love.

We live then in joy but must season our smiles with tears until we reach our journey's end. This is how the fiat in joy and the fiat in sorrow touch.

Vocation vs faith fantasy

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Today’s gospel (Luke 4: 16-30) relates the visit of Jesus to his own town of Nazareth. He reads in the synagogue and preaches on a text of Isaiah. Having at first amazed them, He then upsets the people with His commentary, and becoming enraged they turn into a lynch mob and set out to hurl Him off a local cliff, only to find that He has slipped their grasp and escaped. The level of detail in the synagogue scene is remarkable, evidently an eye-witness account. Was the Blessed Mother there or one of His disciples?

What is this strange tale of preaching and attempted lynching really about? Here are the townspeople, piously praying in their synagogue one moment, and the next, flying into a persecutory rage and attempting to kill a man whose sermon they began by admiring. Here they are one moment wrapped in holy devotion, and the next exploding with violent anger. How did their Dr Jekyll become their Mr Hyde? 

Perhaps the secret to their rage is that Jesus’ commentary on their situation did not live up to the self-admiring perceptions they had about themselves. Jesus dispels these perceptions indirectly by reminding them of the fact that Elijah and Elisha, two of the holiest of the prophets, brought help and relief to Gentiles. After all, if the Jews were God’s chosen people, what could Jesus mean by citing these cases, other than to thumb His nose at their dignity, or so they might have thought? They were angry not because Jesus had offended God; they were angry because He had pulled down the idol they had unwittingly made of themselves in their own hearts. They were angry because, instead of hearing His call to them, He dissolved the comfortable religious delusion which cushioned their convictions.

In one sense, this passage is all about vocation. For our personal vocation is not primarily about what we do, but about how we individually are called to receive and reflect God’s goodness and holiness. The first question of our existence is not what we should do in this life, but what does He call us to be in ourselves? Yet, we cannot so receive and reflect God’s goodness without first listening to His call, which liberates us from those refusals that keep us captive and dispels the blind spots through which we try to write our own life story. Liberation and illumination, a heart free to bask in His loving goodness and a mind blessed to embrace His truth: these are the favours of the year of the Lord. From these fundamentals, the question about what we must then do can be seen in its true light.

So, what is the problem that the Nazarenes are suffering from? They are suffering from a kind of faith fantasy which is almost the opposite of vocation. They do not miss their vocation by irreligiosity; this is crucial. They miss it by having a false perception of God’s intent for them through which they unwittingly envisage not His glory but their own. They miss it by shoddy self-serving deductions based on what they suppose – superficially - it must mean to be God’s chosen ones. Not all those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.

They have all the words of God’s revelation, but they wear them like children dressed in grown-ups clothing. Or rather, they come to the banquet but make a grab for the top seats - why else would they have been invited? They have heard the first lines of the story and imagined they were called to a starring role in it, not understanding that every beauty, great or small, is a jewel in God’s eyes, for His beauty is infinite and infinitely to be reflected in the work of His hands. Their entitlement to perceived privilege has built up their expectations, and when Jesus fails to meet those expectations, they lash out. They longed for the glory of the noisy spectacle - of having a miracle worker bringing renown to their village - only because they had missed the glory of the silent reality of God's call. Perhaps they longed for the extra trade a bit of spectacle would bring in. How the mighty are cast from their thrones!

After the lie that we will be like God, the lie the devil likes to tell people of faith most often is that they will be the great, that they will be significant; that if they just try hard enough to align all the signs, they can glimpse God's intent that destines them to sit at the left and right of the Messiah in His kingdom. Like the God of the gaps in a half-understood universe, they are the hero of a drama that seems to unfold for their own self-realisation; they find two spoons that fit together and believe this betokens a providential destiny, as if spoons never otherwise matched. They do not listen to God's call; they try to author their own. 

To hear one’s vocation it would be infinitely better to beg the grace of being anawim, the little ones, of the Lord. Living that truth of our lives - accepting the new sight of grace and its liberation -  we might then be free to receive and reflect God’s goodness as He so desires, reciting our Magnificat with Mary whose personal pronouns are yes and thank you, not I and me, me, me. In the great choral symphony that sings to His beauty, God’s choicest glories will be gifted to those He chooses, but His blessings are for all those who would receive them.