“Don’t just do something, stand there.”

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

Today's gospel (Mark 8:11-13) is but the briefest of extracts. These days, we might even call it a TikTok gospel. The Pharisees approach Jesus, apparently intent on starting an argument. They say they want a sign from Jesus and no doubt some of them are very pleased not to get one. Having refused their requests, Jesus departs rapidly, climbing back into a boat and making His way across the lake.

Once again, for such a short passage, almost every single line raises questions for us. The Pharisees approach because they wish to test Jesus. Perhaps some among them want to test him out of a habit of searching for signs and wonders as proof positive of the Lord’s action; many of us can be guilty of a touch of that. Perhaps the more honest among them see this test as a condition of sound discernment. We may well fear, however, that other Pharisees impose this test precisely because they felt it was one that Jesus could not pass.

Yet how strange if this was indeed their position. At this point in Saint Mark's gospel, Jesus had already cured or delivered many souls from their illnesses or from possession. Had the Pharisees but inquired among the people who lived in the region from where Jesus had just come, they would have learned that He had fed 4,000 of them with a few loaves and fishes. Just what was the point, therefore, of trying to put Him to the test in this way? Given the context, Jesus’s reply comes as no surprise: Why does this generation demand a sign? I tell you solemnly, no sign shall be given to this generation.

Before He says these words, however, there comes a moment that is revelatory and yet hard to decipher. He sighed deeply in his spirit, says one translation of the gospel. But what happens here? Is this frustration? This cannot be a moment of annoyance for even while the perfect God-Man is like us in all things but sin, He does not suffer from the irregular emotions or dissonant needs caused by the wounds of original sin. On the other hand, if this is an occasion for just anger, why does Jesus not just upend the chairs of a couple of nearby Pharisees, like He will one day overturn a row of money changers’ tables in the temple?

Perhaps we may identify in this moment the docibilitas of Jesus–His teachability–which we should ascribe to His human nature. This is a theory and only a theory, but it is one I find instructive if we consider it in relation to Jesus' other kinds of knowledge. For in Jesus, we know there are three kinds of knowledge, although how they combine and coordinate is beyond our understanding to grasp. There is His divine knowledge which He has through His divine nature and which He cannot cease to have and still be God; there is His infused knowledge which He has as Saviour of the human race, and the prophet of the New Testament; and then there is His acquired knowledge which, in the process of assuming human nature, He allows Himself to be subject to; for Jesus grew in grace and wisdom, as St Luke tells us, after He was rediscovered in the temple. In this gospel extract, then, the docibilitas of Jesus is perhaps that dimension of His human nature and knowledge that prepares Him to face what is, as far as we are aware, a new situation for Him; one He must learn to handle, as He once learned to handle a hammer or to be wise about dealing with beggars. His ignorance is not the ignorance caused by sin but of a true human nature, marvellously gifted and yet in formation, saying its own continual "yes" to the Father.

For what confronts Jesus is not just a refusal of people to believe in Him, but a stubborn and pertinacious rejection of Him. While He knows this is bound to happen, perhaps He has not yet had the experience. He has preached, and they no doubt have seen His goodness or at least the strong evidence for it; there have already been countless miracles associated with Him. And still, here they come, the Pharisees, asking for yet more signs. We know from later in the same chapter of Saint Mark that Jesus will draw a very sobering lesson from this encounter: beware the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But in responding to their apparent incomprehension of His ministry, a range of options still lies before Him. Should He just ignore it and go merrily on His way, tiptoeing through the tulips to His next miraculous moment – a sort of “I’m-the-Messiah-so-get-over-it” response? Such a reaction might seem mere complacency. Or, conversely, should He perhaps organise a discussion group with the Pharisees, host a series of meetings for frank and honest exchanges, and facilitate an accommodation with their sensibilities, attempting to honour the diligence in their observance of the law, rather than denouncing the deceits we now associate with the Pharisees’ name? Yet to do this would be to act through desperation, perhaps even contrary to the freedom of those He was trying to help. Faced by their obstinate unbelief, Jesus seems a little like a medical professional, standing before someone critically ill: should He intervene, or should He not? Should He act and try to save the day like some dashing superhero who can put everything to rights, or should He do nothing, as if there is nothing that can be done, and seem to risk defeat?

And this is where, for the God-Man, the docibilitas becomes pertinent. Of course, as God, He knows perfectly well what to do and what will happen to each and every one of the souls He is dealing with. Yet, in His human nature, He must still navigate this incident on this day in this region: to see, to judge and to act. Through docibilitas, therefore, Jesus in His human nature perhaps recognises the moment for what it is, savours the circumstances in all their concreteness, judges the behaviours before Him for what they are. He is neither overly indifferent, nor is He desperately idealistic about wanting to win the Pharisees over to create a kind of “peace-in-our-time” moment: docibilitas, perhaps, leads Him to carve out a response to a problem for which, humanly speaking, there is no solution without compromising the truth. After all, on this latter point, maybe Jesus could have got the Pharisees on His side if only He had not been so bold with His claims to be somebody special. Just think: with a touch of goodhearted idealism, Jesus might have avoided two thousand years of Jewish-Christian tensions if only... if only He had tempered His rather dogmatic views about being God with …just a little more interreligious sensitivity. But, with His mind made up, He breathes forth a sigh, and a profound sigh at that: humanly, it is a triggering of the parasympathetic system that calms the nerves; divinely, it is a breathing forth, a tangible, incarnate sign of His inner life as the Son, perhaps one last breath of grace on the hypocritical hearts listening to Him.

But that is not the end. The gospel offers one more chilling sign of the cost that the Pharisees’ hypocrisy incurs: And he left them and getting into the boat again he departed to the other side. It was not that Jesus was not there for them, but love them as He no doubt did, He was not there at their wilful beck and call for streaming on demand. The unconditional God of love, the God who goes in search of us when we are lost, is not for all that a TV dinner kind of God who is happy to be shoved in the microwave of our unfaithful hearts when we happen to feel fervent. He will leave the Pharisees for now, hopefully to learn from the disenchanting, bitter taste of their own unbelief. For all their feelings of being justified, they cannot have taken much joy in seeing Jesus retreating in a boat across the lake.

Docibilitas - our teachability – should among other things lead us to a sense of what is within our capacity and of what is not. Through docibilitas, we avoid the extremes that might lead us either to a attitude that is ignorant and indifferent to what is around us, or to a mindset that urges us to idealistic or romantic dreams about ourselves or others. To be docile, to be able to learn from what is around us, as Jesus was, is not to be passive but to recognise the hand of Providence in all that befalls us; to ask for no more than the goodness of God offers us; and finally, to allow ourselves to be led on by that Spirit that Jesus sighed forth with such feeling; the same Spirit that would wrap all men in its embrace, but not cast its pearls before their refusal of the truth. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, and as the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland says, we must learn not just to do something but to stand there; to learn to await God’s moment. 

The peace of the lamb

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 1-9), a passage chosen to mark the feast of Saint Cyril and St Methodius, is one of those parts of the gospel where one could dwell on every line for quite some time. Every expression, every metaphor, and every allusion is pregnant with meaning and significance for the disciples of the Lord. Perhaps, the selection of the seventy-two disciples and their commissioning as missionaries of the good news might make us feel that these are words addressed to those in consecrated life rather than to every Christian. Indeed, in a very concrete sense, the commissioning of the seventy-two is like the creation of the presbyterate, just as the commissioning of the Twelve is the foundation of the episcopate. Yet, in a broader sense, these seventy-two disciples stand for every one of us, and while we may not all live out every single counsel that Jesus places on their shoulders, we are at least called to emulate who they were. And who were they but lambs in the midst of wolves?

To be a lamb in the Christian sense is to be many things. First, it is to be an image of Christ who is the Lamb of God, the Saviour sent for the redemption of the world. St Augustine says that while he is a Christian for himself, he is a priest for others. But on another level, we may observe that to be Christian is to be for others, and primordially for God. Greater love than this hath no one, that a man should lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). Saint Peter tells us that we are all priests, prophets, and kings, meaning that we all share something of these characteristics which exist substantially in the person of Jesus Christ. We are not all appointed to minister sacramentally to his Mystical Body for that is a role accorded only by the Sacrament of Orders, and, nevertheless, there must be something Christlike in each and every one of us. To be a Christian, therefore, is to be a lamb.

With this slightly uncomfortable reflection, we may consider an even more uncomfortable reflection: that we are sent out as lambs among wolves. Here, Jesus’ metaphor evokes everything about the world that we may fear. I take the world in the sense that Saint John gives to that word: the way in which its forces seem ranged against us, the pressure that they exert on us, the exploitation and manipulation they impose. The intent of the wolf is to consume the lamb while the prospect of the unwary lamb is literally to become a lamb’s supper. Who then is the wolf? We may well ask the question, as the scribe who asked Jesus: who then is my neighbour? And the answer to the first question is disturbingly close to the answer to the second. The wolf is my neighbour, my brother, and my sister. Indeed, as the decadent French poet Baudelaire wrote:

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère

Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother.

In other words, you, reader, are the wolf and so too am I. Not that I am all bad (and neither may I say are you). It’s just that we are shapeshifters or, if you prefer, backsliders. Like eggs that can stand on neither of their ends, in the absence of God’s help, we humans are prone first to disobedience and then to every other disgrace that follows on our liberation from God. When we are good, we are very, very good, and when we are bad, we can be rotten. We are lambs by our baptism, we are wolves by birth. We cannot but be sent out as lambs among wolves, for the wolves are among us; indeed, except when we are faithful, they are ourselves.

Every society or indeed social group is prone to want to identify the guilty ones among them – the source of the trouble they all suffer from – and as often as not they scapegoat the wrong person. The key insight of Christianity was to show us that the scapegoat, Christ, is innocent, and that it is we – the rest of us – who are the guilty ones, the source of the problem. In short, the wolves.

But if we are then sent out as lambs among the wolves, we are called to recognise a reality that is, as Chesterton was wont to say, stereoscopic. Saints are not so very different from sinners. Jesus himself said the just man falls seven times a day. We are clay vessels, and even the best of us lack conviction at times and may be full of passionate intensity at just the wrong moments and in just the wrong ways.

These realities are not a reason to despair but rather to become realistic about who we are and about our utter dependence on God. When we say “Peace be to this house” to our neighbour, we must remember that we are unreliable diplomats of peace unless we keep our hearts for the Lord. For that, we must recall that only in the reign of Christ can His peace flourish; only if we say our “yes” continually; only when He remains master of the house, can we we sure that the house is inhabited by lambs, rather than being overrun by wolves.

The editors of today’s gospel extract did not include verses 10-12 from the tenth chapter of Luke, and yet their conclusion is part of the admonition we must daily administer to ourselves:

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for all that town. Such are the words of the Lamb, Christ.

For ourselves, the meaning is clear: to be born a wolf is no excuse for remaining a wolf. If the miracles of grace performed in us had been performed in our neighbours, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

Peace then be upon all our houses, the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ.

The cure that awaits us

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6:53-56) presents one simple scene of the gospel that might be easily overlooked, but which is full of meaning for ourselves and the power of Jesus. Jesus and His disciples were moored at Gennesaret, and the people were following them in their droves. As soon as word got around that Jesus was near at hand, people started flocking towards Him in search of healing for themselves and their friends and relatives. Laying out the sick in the public places, they made it possible for them to touch Jesus as He walked by, and many were thus cured, merely by being within reach of the Saviour.

It would be easy to read this gospel as a story of the fickleness of the people. The healing and the cures come so easily to them, one might be permitted to wonder if the enthusiasm of the crowd was like the enthusiasm of followers after a travelling circus. Were there souls here present who would one day call for the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem? How could they appreciate such immense gifts when they were as abundant or as common as flowers in spring? And as many as touched the fringe of His garment were made well. Easy come, easy go, isn’t it?

And, nevertheless, the miracles worked are not automatic, but rather the work of God’s superabundance. Blessed was the land of Gennesaret, for in that moment, there had rarely been such a fountain of grace or divine gifts known to men. He will have mercy on whom He has mercy. As the presence of evil makes men question whether there is a God, so His gift-giving fills the mind with the conviction that all will be well– as every human heart not utterly lost to demonic cynicism senses that it should be.

Yet, for all that, if we only read this gospel from the perspective of the enthusiastic crowds, we have in a way read it backwards. The action of this gospel does not begin with their enthusiasm, but rather with the coming of Jesus. The crowds were not seeking Him before He had begun to seek them. It is not their enthusiasm which gives this scene its deepest colour. Rather, it is the dogged determination of the Divine Shepherd who comes now in search of the lost sheep.

Note also how these sheep approach Him. On recognising Him, they ran about to seize the moment. They implored His gifts. They practically barricaded the roads with the bodies of the sick. The heart of the Shepherd that went in search of His people was met with fervent welcome, a sense of obligation, and a readiness to importune Him until He had mercy on them, like the woman in the parable who troubles the judge until she gets judgement from him (Luke 18: 1-8). Heart speaks unto heart, as the motto of St John Henry Newman says. Here the heart of the people spoke, because among them they sensed the presence of the Divine Heart. No one ever spoke as this man does, say the temple guards to the Pharisees who wanted Jesus arrested.

Where are we in this gospel scene? Where do we stand in relation to this Divine Visitor in whose hands an abundance of grace is held for our benefit? Do we run after Him? Do we importune Him? Do we mobilise our neighbours as much as we can to make them aware of the blessings that He has for them? Most of all, are we prepared to join the sick and lame in the streets in the hope of receiving from His abundance? Next to the mystery of our own waywardness – our weakness before the three enemies outlined in the gospel last Friday – comes the mystery of our failure to recognise and confess our neediness daily, not to say hourly, not to say in every minute of every day.

And yet, if only we could seize the moment, we might just find that it is in that passing second, that passing moment of grace, that the fringe of His garment is closest to us. Jesus may be hard to recognise from such a supine angle. But we should not doubt that He is there for us, just beyond our inner chaos, just beyond the buffeting tumult of worldly passions, or the seductive traps that the devil lays beneath our feet. There He is for us, passing in the crowd, close to us in our woundedness, driven on by His goodness, busy among the throng, but ever ready to come to our aid, if we will but reach out our feeble hand and seek to touch the fringe of His garment. All He wants is for us to say a determined, decided, and persistent “yes” to the solution He brings to the diseases that hold us back from embracing Him as we are called to do.

The only question that remains now is whether we really want to be cured.

The path to the tomb

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6: 14-29) recounts the events leading up to the beheading of John the Baptist. Herod first imprisoned John for denouncing his marital arrangements, held him prisoner but kept him alive, despite his murderous wife’s desires, and finally – ensnared, like many an arrogant and unwise braggart, by his own words – orders the execution of the herald of the Christ to satisfy the whims of his latest object of lust. For who can believe Herod had no plans for his dancing stepdaughter Salome? She may of course have appeared slightly less desirable with rivulets of blood running down her arms, as she held the decapitated head of the Baptist aloft for everyone to see.

The events of those days and of the fateful night of John’s death are not for the squeamish. They are especially not for the casuists who have not the daring or the desire to go where John’s courage took him. For let us not forget: John was tough on doctrine. His pastoral touch had little to do with soft soaping the consciences of the wayward. He was not in search of accommodations, nor of compromises, nor indeed of finding the good in Herod’s and Herodias’s connubial settlement which was, for all we know, one of gently courtesy and attentive, mutual support; John knew full well that while the light shines in the darkness, the darkness does not comprehend it (John 1:5). For his part, Herod, St Mark tells us, was greatly perplexed and yet heard him gladly, like the sinner who has some kind of relish for the truth but perhaps not the courage yet to do anything about it. Do not extinguish the smoking flax (Matthew 12:20).  

Yet in these events, there are also signs of our own struggles, even if our experiences lie far from the glorious palaces of Herod or the dungeon in which John met his death. Their struggles are ours, for we are on a battleground, or indeed that battleground lies within us. The peace of God in this life is not the peace we will know in heaven but rather the clarity He grants us in the chaos of this life: the chaos in us and the chaos around us. Our call to be contemplative is at once to know the peace within but also to know what and who its enemies are. For they are closer to us than we often are aware of.

Thus, the enmity of the world runs through this gospel. Herod himself is a worldly power run wild, while his morals and expectations are those of the fallen world: the world structured by standards other than God’s. It is not just that the events that unfold are immoral; it is also that the context in which they unfold seems irresistible, unless you have the moral fibre of a man like John. How many parallels there are here with our own situation! It is not just the written laws of the world that surround us; it is all the unspoken norms and expectations that play on our instincts as social animals to fall in and not to stand out. There is only one solution, and it is John’s solution. Speak the truth to power when power confronts us. We must not elect our own martyrdom; but neither must we avoid it if it comes to our door – a door which, for all our outward facing charity, we must allow God to keep watch over.

For, in the end, the enmity of the world would not be half so troublesome to us if it did not find an ally in the enmity of our flesh. The philosopher Immanuel Kant waxed lyrical about the starry heavens above and the moral law within, but the inner man’s lawfulness is dubious at best. The battleground extends within us, and if we have no awareness of it, that is simply because we have been concussed by our own surrender. Herod and Herodias are driven on by their lusts, even if, in Herod’s refusal to recant his rash vow of giving Salome anything she wanted, he showed himself the victim of the expectations of the world, just like every other moral invertebrate. Yet his was fallen flesh, like our own. If we think we are above Herod’s disorders, we might be in for a rude awakening. Original sin weakens every faculty within us, and grace, while it heals, does not take away that thorn in the flesh. Lord, don’t trust Philip, as St Philip Neri prayed, and St Therese of Lisieux towards the end of her life was less and less disturbed by her sins, not because they were little but because they reminded her of her dependence on her redeeming God. She too was a fallen child. Sorrow goes with humility and confidence. John probably invited Herod down to the Jordan for baptism and repentance; if only he had gone. If only he had gone.

The enmity of this world and the enmity of our own flesh, however, might yet be easier to fight were it not for the enmity of the devil. Our media is full of every conspiracy theory going except the one which is a dead cert: the conspiracy of the devil against every single one of us. Are we loved by God? We are hated by the devil – loathed with a loathing that proceeds from an incalculable malice and jealousy, a drive to destroy and despair alike. But then, here’s the thing. Unlike in the movies where the devil speaks in pantomimic guttural tones, the voice of the devil is mostly as sweet and seductive as Salome’s dancing. He uses fear when he needs to: fear of God and fear of sin, as well as fear of the world or fear of superstitions such as Herod entertained. He uses above all deceit, for as God is the author of truth, the devil is the counterfeiter of truth, the extraordinary minister of unholy miscommunication. So, Jerome calls him the ape of God for St Michael’s question Quis ut Deus? Who is like unto God? was only a response to the devil’s pretension of being like God.

For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

And our first parents would be like the devil too, believing they were like God. The devil runs through today’s gospel scene, whispering at Herod’s ear and in Herodias’s plotting, titivating this palace of certain damnation, and murmuring, murmuring, murmuring in the ear of John who sits in the dungeon where the darkness corrodes his human confidence and leaves him naked and bereft of consolation.

When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb, like that of Jesus. For, in the end, there is only one solution in our fight against the three enemies, and it is the path that Jesus took, the path to the cross, and the path to the tomb where John preceded Him: there to await the resurrection to life that is ours for the asking, if only we ask, if only we say ‘yes’ to it, at every moment of our lives.

Our souls as the battlegrounds

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

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Today's gospel (Mark 5: 1-20) is one of the most touching and bewildering in all of St Mark’s life of our Lord. It is most touching, on the one hand, because Jesus delivers a man who is in utter torment from a large number of demons. It is most bewildering because it is not really clear why Jesus should send these demons into a local herd of pigs who then destroy themselves by running off a cliff.

Our hearts must go out to the man possessed in this incident. He is tortured by the demons who have possessed him. Demonic possession is a real, not a symbolic, spiritual event, and it requires a real ministry of exorcists to manage it even today. But this man’s misery is not only spiritual or psychological. In addition to his internal torment, he lives in a cemetery, howls his pain day and night to whoever will hear him, and even gashes himself with stones. This last action may in fact be an attempt at self-therapy, but self-therapy of this kind is itself a torture and cruel burden. If we read these events at a spiritual level, however, this possessed man could stand for any soul who becomes seduced by passions or appetites within, only to find that such passions and appetites themselves become torturers who exact full payment. Perhaps these appetites are for bodily or sensuous pleasures or, for the more pious, perhaps these appetites are for spiritual satisfactions: certainties, signs of approval from God, self-validation and things of this sort. These too can torture no less than sensuous passions to which one has become enslaved. Religious idealism is not a sign of integrity but a dangerous disguise of inner disorder. Who can free us from the body of this death? We know the answer And it is not ourselves.

What is more bewildering in this gospel is the fact that Jesus drove out the demons from this man's soul and allowed them to enter the herd of swine which then plunged themselves over the edge of a cliff. The effect of this event was so great that the people of the town begged Jesus to leave the area. Indeed, the gospel tells us that the people of the town were afraid at what had happened. The Fathers of the Church commenting on this scene offer various interpretations of its meaning. Perhaps the most persuasive, however, is the Jesus is showing the townspeople, and by extension anyone who hears about this event, about the terrible, destructive power that demons can wield. The only “solace” the townspeople had offered to the man possessed was to attempt to put him in chains which he broke in his fury. But this will not do. We cannot protect ourselves from evil by pretending it does not exist or by building imaginary safe spaces for our modern souls. We cannot guard against the gates of hell by minimising the risks.

Especially in our own day, the ambient culture is so enamoured of individual choice that we do not like to think upon the consequences of those who give themselves to evil actions. The story of the man set free of the legion of demons should be a lesson for us that ignorance is no protection, and that we are called to conversion because our souls are a battleground of the Kingdom of God.