Learning our lessons

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 4:26-34) invites us to reflect not only on what the Lord wishes to teach us but also on how He wishes to teach it. We hear two key parables of Jesus in this passage, one of which comes from farming and the other of which – the mustard seed - comes from the natural world. In the first parable, we see a farmer who scatters seed and finds that, with the passage of time, nature plays its part too. Before long, his crop has grown, and it is time for the harvest. In the second parable, we hear a story from the natural world which operates under the hand of the Divine Farmer. Here, even without the intervention of human hand, the small seed grows in the ground and from it sprouts a plant under which the birds can make their home. Lastly, we learn that while Jesus used these parables to teach the people, in private to the disciples He explained his meaning. This passage of course raises many questions, not only about how God fosters the supernatural life in our souls, but also how the divine teacher, Jesus, wishes to enlighten His listeners. These two outcomes are of course intimately linked.

Let's just focus, however, on the second. Why did Jesus use parables? Perhaps we can identify two functions of the parables which together form a paradox.

In His incarnation, Jesus fulfils three roles: priest, prophet, and king. As priest, He is our redeemer whose actions purify us from sin. As king, He is our ruler who reigns over us and indeed over the whole universe. But as prophet, He is our teacher, for contrary to the usual meaning of prophet - one who sees the future - the prophet tells us about the ways of God. O Oriens declared the fifth great O Antiphon before Christmas: Jesus is the rising sun who illumines those who sit in the shadow of darkness.

And yet this illumination is not mere information. The teachings of Jesus are not like an instruction leaflet from IKEA. They are not even merely a Highway Code for the royal path of the Cross. Rather, to be heard and received, the parables must strike home. The heart must become open, the soul must pay attention in such a way that the message is taken to heart. Nobody takes to heart an IKEA instruction leaflet. To take something to heart is to be changed by it; it is to want to change one's life because of it; and to do such a thing may require us to grapple with it, even time after time. And so, as the great Canadian theorist of communication, Marshall McLuhan, a devout Catholic, said, The medium is the message. The medium here is the parable, but the parable, as we have noted, is not just information. The parable calls us to grapple with ourselves; the parable calls us to grapple with God, as we surrender to Him.

The parable, in other words, requires of us to be contemplatives of truth rather than consumers of information. And here we come to the other function of the parable which is paradoxically a contradiction of the first function. For while the parable is an open invitation, it is also a kind of locked door or barrier. We may not just listen to the parable like we might read a road sign. That is not good enough. Its lessons are not just for the mind. Anyone who is not prepared at least to take its message to heart can gain access to its real meaning. Here, the parable does not illumine by its depths but disappointments by its shallowness. Those who contemplate sincerely the parables and are prepared to take them to heart find that, rather like the Tardis of Doctor Who, they are larger on the inside than on the outside. Those who merely listen, as if they were flicking through the pages of a free newspaper, can expect to make little progress with them. It is as the prophet Isaiah, quoted by St Matthew, says: By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.

The drama for us today as we have said is that, all too often, we behave as consumers of information. Indeed, we can behave as consumers towards religion, seeking not a relationship with God but a buyer’s guarantee of his or her own justification. We need to leave these habits in order to become what God intends us to be: no longer the puppets of our unregulated needs but the willing disciples of divine truth, who are ready to part with everything, not least our self-deceptions, so that His light might flood our minds, change our hearts, soothe our wounds with His joy, and wrap us in His embrace of eternal love.

 

 

Standing when all about you falls apart

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 3:22-30) revisits a passage we heard almost exactly twelve months ago (22 January 2024). The scribes from Jerusalem – perhaps supposedly a better class of scribe – deliver their judgement on Jesus with what might have been the kind of scoff we should expect from high-placed talking heads in Roman Palestine:

 He is possessed by the devil, they say. 

Jesus’ refutation of their precipitately formed opinion is swift and decisive: How can Satan cast out Satan? He replies. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. The final lines of this passage, however, are a warning of the ominous confusion that had descended on these high authorities from the capital of Israel: Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, never has forgiveness. Let us consider these three movements of the gospel, like three movements in a piece of music.

 

The first movement

He is possessed by the devil, say the scribes. Thus, they become the malign patron saints of all those who, henceforth, in the history of the Mystical Body will take scandal at her action and find a devil in her. Their descendants might be traced today to those who accuse the Church of wickedly barring women’s ordination or oppressing certain minorities. There is a mystery here and it is a mystery of iniquity. It is a common enough assumption these days that we take the Lord’s inunction not to judge as a command to think everyone is inspired by the best of intentions. Judge not, lest you be judged, is the Lord’s command, and yet He also tells us to be wise as serpents; we cannot take this rule about not judging as an indication that we will not face malice and opposition, for these are the lot of fallen humanity. Christ asks us not to judge where people stand ultimately before God; not to stick our heads in the ground and pretend there is nothing wrong. There have been many devils in the Church, as the long lines of abuse victims can testify, but let us not forget that the actions of abusers are a betrayal what the Church is. Moreover, if they are devils who scoff at the Church from the outside, is the same not true of those who scoff at their brothers and sisters within the Church, who unthinkingly adopt spite rather than true discernment as their mode of relating to others?

 

The second movement

And thus begins Jesus’ refutation of their scoffing nonsense: a house divided against itself cannot stand. Actually, Satan’s house cannot but be divided against itself. It was called to stand for God; it tried instead to stand for itself, its own vainglory and security, and thus it forged a bargain with the malice of dissent, leaving behind the logic of God’s charity. Yet, the temporary unity of those in revolt against God – this is what Jesus here alludes to - is ultimately founded on the shifting sands of radical selfishness and, therefore, of division. According to the poet Yeats in the The Second Coming,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Satan’s house cannot stand against itself, and such as it is, it will fall, as everything founded on sand will fall. The only question for us is whether anything in our own lives risks involving us in that calamitous conclusion. No earthly power will hold us at the centre; no privilege or perfection of our own can prevent the anarchy which sin looses upon our souls if we, in our pitiable turn, choose to scoff like Satan rather than to bless. How can we avoid such an outcome unless we ask ourselves with honesty: where do I make myself weak? For none can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus here refers to Satan, but we can apply the principle to ourselves. Weakened by the flesh, compromising ourselves through the world, we are at every risk of the deceits of the Enemy whenever we try to source our strength in ourselves, rather than in the Almighty.

 

The third movement

And thus comes the conclusion: all sins can be forgiven except the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, i.e. the sin of abandoning hope in the goodness of God, of finding nothing but evil in the works He has wrought to the point that one concludes God has an unclean spirit. This, after all, is the fault that these scribes commit.

And before we find such a conclusion too obscure – for who ascribes such uncleanness to God? - we should observe that this anti-God nihilism surrounds us. It shapes the high, moralistic barracking of contemporary liberalism for which the ten commandments are a kind of genocide against human freedom. To say that God’s law is opposed to human freedom is indeed to say, He has an unclean spirit, for who but an evil God would impose such burdens on His children?

The only response to such accusations is to remember who it is they really accuse, the one who stands accused in this very gospel. My yolk is sweet, and my burden is light, He replies. Heaven forefend that we should hold His law to be too high or too heavy to be kept by His grace, and yet, is this not the meaning of the widespread abandonment of the Christian law around us, where it is assumed that there is such an unbridgeable gulf between our condition and the path He calls us to? That certain human actions are so much part of human nature that God cannot really have intended to forbid them? Here we should remember that encouraging humans to defy God’s command not to eat of a particular fruit was in fact the devil’s original temptation.

All that remains for us to do, therefore, is to offer up our “yes” and “thank you” to the one who can deliver us from the devils around us.  

 

 

Calls from the mountain

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 3: 13-19) narrates on one simple level the calling of the disciples and their appointment as apostles, i.e., as messengers sent out on what was a kind of interim mission to preach and to cast our demons. St Mark names them all too with their aliases: Simon who is Peter and James and John, known as the sons of thunder – surely as an insiders’ joke. St Mark ends the list with the obligatory but difficult reminder of Judas Iscariot, adding soberly who betrayed him. Apart from the last name, this is a roll of honour, even if St Mark’s gospel is replete not only with Peter’s glories but also his humiliations. These were the men that Jesus appointed out of all the sons of Israel: this ragtag band of fishermen, zealots, wealthy tax collectors and poor labourers, extroverts, and introverts, heroes and sometimes cowards, all martyrs in the end, save for Judas the traitor and John who survived his martyrdom to live on into old age. These were the ones that the Father had given to Jesus. These were His beloved disciples in whom He was well pleased.

Behind this roll of honour, however, stands further mysteries for our contemplation. In the first case, this gospel recalls the gospel of Monday this week when, in order to reach Jesus, the friends of the paralysed man needed to ascend to the heavens or at least to the level of the roof tops, thereafter, to descend of course into the house. If you want to see far, go high but, as French writer Georges Bernanos says, note carefully: Quelle paix dans les hauteurs, what peace in the heights! No greater administrative task lay ahead of Jesus than the naming of the twelve, the recruitment of his stewards, the communicating of responsibility for His mission into the hands of mere human beings, be they ever later helped by the sending of the Holy Spirit. And like all great tasks, this task begins with an ascent of the mountain.

 There are some odd, supposedly practical forms of Christianity that claim one can be a practical Christian without such ascents. But can this be true? Christ consistently retreats into prayer throughout the gospel, time and time again, especially in critical moments or junctures. And what this means for us, His disciples now, is clear enough: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too. We must be there then in prayers, on the gentle path and on the windswept mountain, in the harvest fields and in the fallow, in the fervour of devotion and in the bleak breezes of spiritual winter where not even a lowly Rosary seems to quicken our spiritual pulse. If we serve Him, we must follow Him, wherever He is, His servants must be there too.   

From this following of Jesus, moreover, we are in a better place to understand something of the depths behind those simple words:

He called to Him those whom He desired.

There is in such a word at least two further mysteries: the mystery of His desire for us and the mystery of His predilection among us or the selectiveness of His love. Some are called into His inner sanctum; some are relied on to carry His word afar. All live in His intimacy but in such different ways. The mystery of His deep love for every soul does not cancel out the mystery of the variety of ways in which that love is lived at very different levels of participation. From this comes the galactic spectrum of vocations for we are not all called to be the same role, and our various calls reflect His infinite beauties differently, like those many-paned stained-glass windows that admit at once the one source of solar energy but thus illuminate by ten thousand shafts of brilliant light.

And so, He desires us: each and every one in our individuality but also in His likeness, for it is through our resemblance with Him that we show forth our adoption in grace. Twelve individuals at first, then more, and then spreading through Israel and out into the nations. His call goes out: to ascend the mountain first and then to carry the message forth as best we can, before returning at the harvest. In COLW, this pattern is shown to us through the charism where we become like Him (incarnational), draw close to Him (contemplative), carry His word forth (apostolic), and live the good news together (living in community). Our ‘yes’ to this vocation is an echo of Mary’s ‘yes’, all the more so for she was the desire of the King before us all. In this light, we can see why God’s predilection – an idea which runs counter to our contemporary assumptions about equality – actually serves the good of all for the more we belong to God, the more we are available to all: their sister, their brother, in everything following Jesus’ example.

Jesus went up on the mountain. Let us follow Him there.

Wayfarers and beholders

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 2: 18-22) sees Jesus in one of His first exchanges with people. Later on, these questions are deceitful and meant to entrap Him. But this inquiry comes from no particular group and seems to be an honest observation on one particular difference they had noted among Jesus’ disciples: why do they not fast like the disciples of John and the Pharisees? Jesus replies to them with a metaphor, a kind of parable in miniature, in which He is the bridegroom and the disciples His companions. He then evokes two further metaphors - one about repairing fabric and the other about filling wineskins - each no doubt grounded in the culture of the time, but the meaning of which would have been by no means apparent to His listeners. This is a good example of the pedagogy of the Lord; when once we have arrived at the stage where we can ask questions, we should not expect direct answers but rather invitations to come further up and further in. Did we think that fasting was needed? Perhaps it was but we need to consider other factors. Did we think that things would be like they were in the past? Perhaps they should be but there are new matters to be considered. This gospel scene is not so much about the indiscipline of disciples who are not fasting, but rather about the newness that Jesus’ ministry is about to initiate on earth.

Let us begin with this newness. God fulfilled His covenant to the Jews and in doing so sent to earth His Only Beloved Son: Behold I make all things new. (Rev. 21: 5). This too was a matter of the divine pedagogy that aimed to draw one of the fallen peoples of the earth towards the mysteries that the fullness of revelation would eventually disclose, and from them to reveal those mysteries to the entire human race. This was the plan. And the fullness of this revelation is why Jesus’ coming required the weaving of a new fabric, the seamless robe of the Church, in which all sinners could find a place. The fullness of this revelation is the new wine that cannot be decanted into the old wineskins of the Jewish ritual laws, but rather requires the new wineskins provided by the Holy Spirit. All of this is evoked in these two metaphors which, as I say, could only have planted questions rather then provided a solution to the original puzzle of why the disciples were not fasting.

But if the outer structures and gestures of religion were about to change, symbolised by the fabric and the wineskins, the biggest change is indicated by Jesus’ first metaphor of His being the bridegroom. It is easy to imagine that some in the crowd scratched their heads and wondered if he was about to announce his betrothal to some lucky Jewish maid. The more learned among them might have wondered if there was some spiritual significance to what he was saying, for this image of “the bridegroom” is redolent of the Song of Songs, one of the more mysterious books of wisdom in the Old Testament that evoked the relationship with God and his people, and as we now know the betrothal of Christ with the Church, through the metaphors of marriage and sexual desire. Jews were not allowed to study the text until the age of 30, when, one supposes, they were deemed morally continent enough to listen to its teachings.

For those with ears to hear, however, this metaphor of the bridegroom said everything that needed to be said abour how Jesus saw His mission now. At other times in other gospels, He evokes His passionate love and determination in other ways: I come to cast fire upon the earth, and what would I but that it be kindled? (Luke 12: 49). Here, however, the metaphor is not merely abstract, but grounded in the two poles of Christian life: our current distance from God and the confession of God’s passionate love for us that draws us back to Him. And these two poles are themselves approached and marked by the need to fast and the need to be festive.

The fullness of Jesus' revelation later on will help us to understand an intrinsic paradox of our life on this earth. In some ways, we remain wayfarers on the journey whose dangers are not yet passed and whose risks are not yet fully behind us. These are the moments when we realise that we have not yet arrived definitively in the arms of our beloved Saviour. This is why we fast: to do penance for our sins, to chastise our flesh into subjection, and - if for one other reason which we seldom think of - because the bridegroom has gone away. Whatever the motives for human joy and indeed for spiritual joy, the bridegroom has gone away and is not yet returned.

But if we are wayfarers, the revelation of Jesus shows us the extent to which the Father's plan is to temper the difficulties of our condition by placing us already in the presence of the One to whom all our journey directs us. And His presence amongst us is multiple: in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar, the source and summit of the Church’s life; in the words of Sacred Scripture, committed to us through the gift of the Church (for, as St Augustine says in his letter to Manichaeus, I would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do so); in our hearts through grace where the Blessed Trinity dwells; in our neighbour in all their distress and in whom we find His image and likeness; and, why not, as St Francis found, in the world of nature created by His hand.

Has then the bridegroom truly gone away? Indeed He has, but only to allow the mission of the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to shape and mature what the Son had planted, to sanctify it and make it holy, and bring it to the fullness of life and love, as once He did in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

 The bridegroom has gone away, and we must fast. But if we only look around us, like the separated lovers we are, we will find the presence of the Divine Spouse everywhere.

Jesus, the diamond geezer

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 2:1-12) sees Jesus perform one of His iconic miracles, healing a paralysed man who has been lowered through the roof of the house where He is sitting. Among the crowd are found scribes that question whether it is blasphemy for Him to forgive this man's sins. The miraculous healing that Jesus performs is a direct answer to their scrutiny. Some passages of the gospel are like nuggets of precious metal that appear single and unitary in nature. Other passages are more like precious jewels for when we cast the eyes of faith upon them, many details seem to give forth their light.  Today's gospel is of the latter kind.

First, we can note the marvellous detail that the house Jesus performs this miracle in is His home in Capernaum. Perhaps this was only for a time since, as we hear later on, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay down His head. We think of COLW’s devotion to the Holy House of Nazareth, but this makes one wonder whether there might ever have been a devotion to a Holy House of Capernaum. We are now so used to the spectacular notion that Jesus makes His home in us that the idea He ever made His home other than in Nazareth takes us by surprise.

This scene is likely the first time in His ministry when we see Jesus also reading the hearts of His listeners. Again, we are so used to the notion that, as God, He knows our every innermost thought that is hard to get a sense of how awestruck they must have been to realise He knew exactly what they were thinking. We find ourselves struggling at times to understand our own hearts, their motives and the swirling undercurrents that drive us on blundering through our day, but we should probably appeal more regularly to the One who knows our hearts best. To feel that we are known so thoroughly is a happy preparation for our necessary abandonment to His divine will.

Yet another beautiful face of this gem of a gospel passage can be seen when we consider which is the greater miracle here, for there are in fact two: the miracle of the healing from paralysis and the miracle that the man’s sins are forgiven. For the third time in this gospel, we note something spectacular that we are far too accustomed to: the idea that our rebellion need not end in our separation from God but that He Himself has engaged to rebuild the bridges we have broken. As Shakespeare says.

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

And note something else here also: this double miracle underscores a most important truth about grace, namely, that charismatic gifts - in this case, the gift of healing - are not for ourselves, but for others. What makes the paralysed man holy is not his miraculous cure but the forgiveness of his sins which comes not from Jesus’ charismatic gift as healer but from Jesus as His redeemer. The inner reality of holiness is not found in show-stopping supernatural phenomena, or in those spectacular natural gifts that the saints sometimes display, but rather in the quiet cleansing and inner reform that comes from sanctifying grace.

Let us dwell finally on yet another dimension of this diamond of a gospel passage; speaking personally, it was the one that most attracted my eye when I first became aware of it as a child. To enter this crowded house, the men who brought the paralysed man to Jesus did no less than climb on the roof, take it apart, and lower the poor fellow into the crowd below. The gospel tells us that Jesus saw their faith, but we can also wonder at what it is that this faith enticed them to do. For what strikes me about their action is that they went in the opposite direction to the mass of human beings pressing around the house like a swarm of wasps eager to gain access. We who are carried along by the busyness of our lives, by the frenetic rhythms of our self-importance, and who swallow too often our own excuses for distraction and inattention, could perhaps take a leaf out of the book of these men who neglect the rush, leave the crowd behind, dispense with the conventional necessity of entering a house through its front door, or even the unconventional necessity of hopping through a window, and who find instead the almost unique solution of arriving in the centre of attention by first passing via the heights of heaven. Is there any better example in the gospel of suppliants of Jesus who abandon all human resorts only to alight on a path that they would not have normally taken, the path that leads them straight to the feet of the Holy One?

Away then with our pious pretence of finding God among the pots and pans in a desperate blur of activism, like an addict shooting religious enthusiasm into his veins. We cannot find God among the pots and pans unless our hearts ascend quietly and serenely above the rush of the crowd and become attentive to the one thing necessary; unless we are ready to buck the trend of frenzy, not to abandon duty but to approach it from a different angle. Love’s labours are indeed lost unless our hearts, divided by every claim on our attention, have ceased to put themselves in God’s place and surrendered gently to the Divine Labourer within.

Repent, believe and follow

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 1:14-20) shows us Jesus in the first steps of His public ministry. His herald has gone before Him and announced His coming, even if the disciples of John struggled to understand why they needed to switch their devotion from the herald to the one whose coming he was sent to announce.   And then Jesus steps forth, gathering His disciples, notably those who will form the core of the Apostolic College: Simon, Andrew, James and John. And in all this movement and change, the going forth of the Son of God and the turning upside down of the lives of His followers, Jesus gives three commands which will remain central to His coming mission: repent, believe and follow me.

Repent: because He came to save us from sin, and not only from sin itself but from all the waywardness in us, the woundedness that prepares the way towards sin. He comes not only to save but to cure, not only to redeem but to raise us up as sons and daughters of His Father in heaven for His grace both heals and elevates us. Imagine what it was like to hear those first calls to repentance. We have forgotten the story of our fallenness, but the Jews were well aware of it, and not only of the fall but of their history of infidelity to the Lord who always forgave them, sent them His messengers, comforted them in their griefs, and taught them to rejoice in Him. Our path now is the very same: to leave behind the old man, as long as it takes, little by little, day by day, with a million moments of saying “yes” to the Lord, separating ourselves from our waywardness to be made anew in Christ; sometimes carried along by the breeze of the Holy Spirit, and sometimes feeling like we alone are rowing a boat in a storm but never less alone than when alone.

And then comes the next command: believe. Because we leave the old life behind to embrace something new in the Lord. To me to live is Christ and to die is gain, St Paul will later tell us. But this new realm is hidden from our eyes, promised to us but not yet in our grasp. We have heard that we are going home but we are not yet arrived. To believe is to have confidence in the coordinates, in the compass points of the gospel, in the vision that compels us forward, an invitation to the inner festival of the life of the Blessed Trinity. And to believe is to hold fast to the means that He gives us to come home: his Mystical Body, the communion of the saints, the ecology of the sacraments, the life of prayer when He joins Himself to us now in advance, placing His hand constantly beneath our elbows as we take our faltering steps towards Him. For He is not only our Creator and Redeemer but our companion and the Spouse of our souls.  

And hence comes his third command at the start of His public ministry: follow me. Christianity is not just ethics; it is ethos also. And its unique ethos is that of friendship with the divine to the point of an intimate union with Him. “Follow me,” thus comes to the ears of these first disciples on the shores of Lake Galilee, as it comes down the ages to us also. In St John’s gospel we learn that when Jesus asked the two disciples of John (one of whom was Andrew) what they wanted, they asked Him: where do you live? Come and see, He answered. And this is His constant invitation to us: follow me, come see where my Father and I live. Paradoxically, this following begins with a procession inwards, to the place where the Trinity takes up their abode in us through baptism and sanctifying grace. There we come to know the Divine Persons, but we also must come to know ourselves, to know our wretchedness and unsuitability, for Jesus prefers the most unsuitable persons that the power of His grace might be more transparent in their transformation. Only then can they become fishers of men.

Repent, believe, follow me: we will need to hear these commands again and again, for our grip on them is poor, and the road goes on longer than our human enthusiasms can ever possibly drive us. Only grace will bring us there, as we leave behind our worse selves, greet the beauty of His plans for us, and answer His “yes” to us, echoing the “yes” of His Blessed Mother” with a constant, grace-given “yes” of our own.