With great power comes great responsibility

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10:13-16) shows Jesus in a mood we are less than comfortable with. There are no imaginative parables to soften the sharp edge of His analysis. Instead, we hear a dressing down for the towns and villages where He has preached: Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum. The towns He compares them to, Tyre and Sidon, were no doubt dens of vice and iniquity. So, what was their problem? And, were they really quite as bad as Jesus implied?

The problem is very simply stated. Their streets had been filled with crowds desperately following after the Lord, straining to hear His voice which echoed off the stones and tiles. Their main squares had heard the preaching of the Son of God, delivering His message of good news, of mercy and forgiveness, of healing and peace. Their denizens had witnessed Him exercising extraordinary and miraculous powers, curing diseases and healing disfigurements that some had endured since they were born. And through it all, these towns did not truly know the hour of their visitation or grasp who it was that walked among them.

They saw the power of God, but they did not do penance. Their ambitions had been set alight by the seeming dignity that came from the visitation of this local superstar. Perhaps most tellingly, the cash registers of their shops and the money boxes of their merchants were probably filled to overflowing by the wave of humanity that lapped at Jesus’ feet. And all these things were their undoing.

For they sinned both by omission and by commission: by omission, first, because they did not realise that they could not bear fruit unless they were prepared to undergo the penitential pruning and dunging that every good garden must endure. They had not understood that in the logic of the Lord, death is the condition of life, and that every good tree that brings forth fruit must be cut back to deliver another yield. And they sinned by commission: for they missed the real import of Jesus’ message and they only thought about what it brought to them. Instead of the gold of the love of God, their hearts were won over by the fool's gold of the love of self. The gospel does not say explicitly that these towns revelled in the money that flowed into them thanks to the crowds who came to listen to Jesus. But since we know that humans either serve God or mammon, we can be sure that there was money involved.

Who are they then, these obscure towns, who treated the Lord in such a vile way? Who are they to have neglected penance after all that they had heard? Who are they to think of self-glory - to be puffed up as the destinations favoured by the miracle worker - when they had seen with their own eyes the glorious intervention of divine power upon the earth? Who are they to have such base interests when Jesus had pointed them towards the eternal horizon, and shown them the path to an everlasting Kingdom? Who are they if not ourselves?

For how often have we understood that we needed to do penance, and found some excuse to leave it undone? How often have we, perhaps secretly and surreptitiously, considered ourselves better than those whose reddest sins are painted in huge letters on the front pages of the tabloids? How often have we gone after the illusions that deceive us, putting first our own glory and our own earthly gain in whatever currency we happen to value: human respect, material possessions, vainglory, illicit pleasures? And as for you [here say your own name to yourself], did you want to be exalted high as heaven? You shall be thrown down to hell. Jesus’ words. O Lord, prayed St Philip Neri, don’t trust Philip!

So, what ought we to do, apart from daily penance and from seeking true self-knowledge? The answer comes in the final sentence of this gospel: anyone who listens to you listens to me. We must listen, keeping our ear close to the Apostolic tradition, the tradition that teaches total self-gift to God who has given Himself in total self-gift to us. The Apostolic tradition is a tradition of listening, for in hearing the voice of Jesus, we hear the voice of the Father, and in hearing the voice of the Apostolic tradition, we hear the voice of Jesus. I have passed on what I have received, wrote St Paul, for goodness shares itself.

In the revelation of Jesus, received through a grace-given faith, perfected by the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, we find all we need to know to convince our hearts of this simple truth: that the power to love God is a greater gift than any other, and that with great power comes great responsibility.