A new song to the wonders of the Lord

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) relates the central mystery of our charism in COLW – the Annunciation. What is announced is not only the coming of the Saviour, the Son of the Most High, not only His reign over the house of Jacob and His everlasting kingdom, but also the mysterious privileges that underpin the vocation of the Virgin Mary, paving the way for the restoration of the human race to its original course of friendship with God. Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you … Mary, you have found favour with God. God, who sees all time in one moment, anticipates in this one human creature the effects of the infinite merits of his Son and gives to her the extraordinary grace of conceiving a Son by whose grace she too has been saved. We all enjoy God’s gifts; this privilege was His to her. As she will soon proclaim to her cousin, her spirit thus rejoices in God her saviour. In Adam all have sinned; in Christ all have the possibility of redemption. But just as the original Adam’s fault was prepared by a woman, his companion Eve, so now the second Adam’s redemption is prepared by a reversal of Eve’s original disobedience in Mary’s fiat. This “yes”, she chooses freely in her sinless state, just as Eve freely chose sin in her sinless state; their sinlessness did not take away free their choice.

This, then, is the favour in which God the Father finds His daughter Mary: a state now of original harmony. And it is her harmony with Him which becomes the counterpoint for a new song to the Lord whose melody will be added by the Son she raises. When we pray in our turn that our lives may become a song of constant praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, all we do is add another line, another verse, to this existing harmony that begins through Jesus’ work in Mary’s soul at her conception. And as she was chosen by Him before the foundation of the world, so we too find ourselves beneficiaries of a similar election and, like her, find ourselves called to be holy and blameless, according to the purpose of His will.

Her mysteries are ours; from her immaculate conception comes in some sense our conception in grace. For there is no motherhood without begotten children, and in some way, her immaculate conception not only prepares her to bear God’s son - painlessly, say the Fathers of the Church - but to bear in a spiritual way His mystical body in the ugly labour pains of Calvary. For nothing will be impossible with God who reaps where He did not sow and gathers where He did not scatter and who, in the case of His Son, has already sent a herald ahead of Him, to prepare His ways and announce His coming, first in the previously barren womb of John's aged mother Elizabeth.

And now Mary does not begin her song but adds a new verse with the Father’s bass and foundation, the grace notes of the Holy Spirit, the melody of her Son from the depths of her womb, and her own haunting descant, learned in the holy solitude of her immaculate heart where she had long mediated on the favours of her maker:

Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.

There is no other key in which we can sing. Our new song is only a variation on the melody and harmony of Mary’s song, the theme tune of the Mystical Body in which reverberates the mercies of God in this world and in the next.

Glorious things are spoken of you, O Mary, for from you arose the sun of justice, Christ our God. We need no other song. This is the new song, God’s redeemed composition, its instruments chosen, its harmonies grounded in love and mercy, its verses unfolding in the lives of those who echoes Mary’s fiat; its climax the singing of the same mercies in a grand choral and orchestral tutti, the perpetuum mobile of the eternal chorus.

Broken vessels

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

*****

Today's gospel (Matthew 9: 27-31) sees another healing at the hands of Jesus, son of David. Two blind men follow Him along the path and approach Him when he reaches His destination. They profess their belief that He can cure them and cure them He then does. Finally, He warns them sternly not to tell anyone about this, but they go and of course spread the news throughout the local area.

On one level Jesus’ behaviour in this scene seems hard to understand. These are blind men, and He fully knew they were there. Why did He leave them stumbling after Him in search of their cure, instead of stopping to assist them? Why did He ask them if they believed He could cure them when, surely, only determined believers would have followed Him in the circumstances just described?  And finally, why did He warn them sternly to conceal what must have been a life-transforming joy, a warning He knew full well they would ignore anyway? Truly, Jesus, as St Teresa of Avila said to Him, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you don’t have many!

Nevertheless, there are layers within the layers of this story, and undoubtedly unknown factors that Jesus knew full well but about which we could only speculate. More concretely, we have to start from the principle that Jesus’ healing ministry is not to the body alone but to the soul of man. Jesus is not a genie to be summoned by the magic words “Son of David”. These blind men ended in faith, but where did they begin their journey if not perhaps with the equally blind enthusiasm of the crowd with its taste for the spectacular rather than the transcendent? Jesus made them follow Him not to take them on a journey away from Capernaum, but on a journey away from their worse selves to discover something better than they had anticipated. Wherever I am, my servant must be there too. They could not arrive at this destination on the wings of religious fervour; only by following the perhaps stony lakeside path along which Jesus wound His own way to a house that was not identified in this scene but which we may well assume was in various ways the house of the Father.

Why then did Jesus ask them if they believed He could cure them? Once again, this is not so much about seeking reassurance for Himself, as about helping them grow out of their jejune mindset to arrive at something more mature. They had begun by craving the admittedly jackpot-winning prize of the restoration of their sight. While they wanted something miraculous, they crowded about Jesus like a couple of game-show contestants, looking to get their hands on the lucre. Jesus was a wonderworker, was He not?

Indeed, no, He wasn’t, and He isn’t. Jesus is not after an admiring crowd and a grateful audience; He is not a P. T. Barnum in sandals. He walks the earth to call its inhabitants to something better than riches, more real than power, and more far-reaching than self-satisfaction. Do you believe that I am able to do this? He asks the blind men. What is this? We assume He means restore their sight but let us not be dupes of the spectacular also. Jesus is looking beyond the appearances, to a transformation that lies deeper than this mere return to vision. After all, if they eye offend thee, pluck it out. Jesus spent little time demonstrating His power over nature; to demonstrate His conquest over sin, however, He went to the cross. Merely to believe in the spectacular is an exercise in naivety; to believe in redemption, on the other hand, takes something more truthful, humbler, and more mature, a readiness to recognise and accept the fallen condition of man, the need for a redeemer, the incapacity of human beings to work their own passage to heaven, and our utter dependence on Him in every moment of our lives. To say, yes, I believe, to Jesus should not be a profession of belief in His magical powers to deliver whatever our hearts desire, no matter how good that is in itself; it is to admit and confess who He is, and to recognise everything about us that estranges us from Him and from the Father, wrecking His work in us. To say I believe is thus to accept the truth about Him and, by corollary, about us.

For these men – and this is not always the case in those who are healed - the first condition of preserving the fruits of this confession and of persevering in the following of Jesus was to keep it to themselves. Jesus wanted no return to the sensationalism than drove them to follow Him in the first place. He wanted them to spend time reflecting on what He had done for them; to realise its implications; to figure out where to go and what to do next. Instead of which, as the gospel wearily tells us, they went away and spread His fame through all that district.

What was this mistake? It was of course a very human one, but a mistake none the less. They wanted, invoked, and seemed to have obtained a display of the spectacular. What had actually happened was that Jesus had cured them, while calling them to something deeper and more real; and instead of pausing to draw breath, to realise what had just happened, they resorted to their taste for the old razzle dazzle. They were in touching distance of the gold of His love, and they chose the fools’ gold of being legends in their own lunch time.

There will be a moment to spread the word, but it does not come before something more genuine, something deeper, something more radically transformative than a hurriedly muttered profession in Jesus’ power has taken place within us. We must recognise Him but also ourselves for what we truly are: loved but very chipped and broken earthen vessels. 

Mountains that move faith

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 5-11) sees once more the incident of the curing of the centurion’s servant which we heard on 16^th September. What informed the centurion’s confidence was not his vestigial Roman religion, but his understanding of how military authority worked. Jesus spoke and acted as one with authority. That the centurion’s Roman mind could see a lot more clearly than many of the children of the Father’s own house. Faith and humility are two of the virtues that Colwelians honour in Mary our Mother, and they are enshrined deeply in this gospel scene of the centurion’s request for his servant's healing.

I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.

These were perhaps shocking words to Jesus’ listeners, grown fat with pride on the predilection of God’s favour. If many will come from east and west to the kingdom, just what did it mean to be a descendant of Abraham in the faith, they might have asked? What was the point of all their faithfulness, if its reward was not to be exclusive to them? It is the pride of the eldest brother of the prodigal son. It is the jealousy evoked by the rewards given to the workers of the eleventh hour.

But there is a warning here in Jesus’ words for all believers not to impose human measures on divine plans. It is a warning which holds true for us now. We look for certitudes when we are invited to confidence. We want estimates when our minds could not even begin to fathom the exactitude of the divine knowledge which knows every hair upon the head of the most hirsute among us. Some things - many things even – we cannot encompass, nor should we seek to. It is enough to know they are in the divine hands. If this is a warning not to look down our noses like the elder brother of the prodigal son, it is also a caution not to place others on pedestals, which we do likewise to sure up our insecurities, for this too is the result of human measures run wild. The poverty-stricken widow of last Monday’s gospel was probably the holiest woman to set foot in the temple that year, apart from the Blessed Mother. As for the phylacteried Pharisee, suppurating with feigned piety, let us leave his status and his destiny to the mercy of God.

But the lesson Jesus serves today with regard to the need for humility comes precisely from the centurion’s exceptional faith, a faith that exceeded all the human estimations of what was possible. We cannot believe this was the end point of the centurion’s faith either. Beyond this healing, would he not have heard an even steadier, deeper call from God, urging him to let that mustard seed of confidence in Christ grow into faith in the Father of all, and thus to go up to the mountain of the Lord?

In a sense the centurion’s destiny which Jesus foretells here – of feasting with Abraham, Issac and Jacob in the eternal kingdom – cannot be understood except in the light of the first reading today in which Isaiah prophesies that

the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up among the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many people shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.

In all humility, we must recognise that if we have faith, then this too is our mountain, the dwelling place of our Father and, therefore, of His children. If humility teaches us to be lowly, it is in the nature of this mountain of faith – the mountain of the kingdom - to place us among the heights, to give us glimpses of things that no lowland dweller can see. Here, we walk in the light of the Lord, like climbers above the clouds, thrilled by visions that we never expected and could not have imagined. While humility teaches us to let go of our human measures, faith teaches us to drink deep of the divine measures, as Isaiah says

that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.  

From the faith of the centurion then, we can reach out in our prayer and perhaps catch a glimpse of the vision that inspired the military poet John Gillespie Magee who stepped on heights

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.