Setting the world on fire

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 25-30) offers us a series of Jesus’ teachings which are superficially easy to understand but beneath which lie chasms of gigantic, challenging truths. Jesus praises the Father for revealing His teachings to little children, while hiding them from those who believe they are the grown-ups. Jesus underlines His special relationship with the Father, and the fact that no one can know the Father except by His grace. Finally, He encourages us to shoulder His burdens which are easy and light.

It all seems so simple, doesn't it? Like a Helen Steiner Rice birthday card, or a car bumper sticker. These are the kinds of “Jesus sayings” that could be repeated on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, for they seem to validate the kind of humble-crumble religion that does not threaten to overwhelm, and charms us a little with mystical allusions. If we take just these very lines that are read today from the lectern, we could easily imagine they had been polished for Jesus by a clever PR guru. One can easily imagine the sworn enemies of truth happy to turn most of this extract into a series of lapel badges with smiley faces, to be given out free of charge to young people at music festivals, once the drugs have worn off and the morning-after pills have been distributed.

But all of these flights of ironic fancy would only then disguise the stony hardness of this eleventh chapter of Matthew which begins with John the Baptist sending his own disciples to Jesus to ask whether He is really the Messiah - John the Baptist, a man who finds himself in prison for being what shall we call it…publicly judgmental about the tetrarch and his personal life? One can do all kinds of wicked things in this world with the world’s approval, from bankrolling orgies to dining with your enemies, but if you insist, like John the Baptist, on taking the law of God on marriage and sex seriously, then prepare yourself for tribulation. I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. By the way, John the Baptist knew full well who Jesus was; he sent his disciples to Jesus only because they were too devoted to himself, and he wanted them to see the reality of the Messiah.

And, so, this disarmingly simple, perhaps we could say this deceptively simple, gospel continues. For on the one hand,

No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,

but on the other, this gift of the Son does not come without responsibility on the part of the listener. Just before this passage, Jesus denounces the towns where His miracles have been performed. They have seen his works but found Him wanting. In other words, the Son offered to reveal the Father to these towns and yet they closed their minds against Him. When He cures the lame, these towns behave as if He had given them bread and circuses and can't get enough of Him; when He calls them to repent and to go and sin no more, He finds them indifferent – as if the problem lies with Him, not them.

I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgement than for you,

says the gentle Jesus, at least before the apostolic PR department get hold of the message.

Take a chill pill, Jesus, they will want to say. Are you trying to drive people away?

No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him, Jesus replies.

And then comes Jesus’ final coup de grace - my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This time the objections of the Apostolic PR department would probably relate to the terms of the trade description act. How can Jesus say His burden is light while also saying take up my cross and follow me? This is very mixed messaging. Jesus needs to simplify His message, doesn’t He? Or rather, instead of saying both these things, Jesus would be much better off just preaching about the easy and the light bit, wouldn’t He? And for us, isn't that what preaching the gospel is or all about, giving Jesus cupid lips, filling his arms with a basket full of Easter eggs for the children, and polishing His language so that He is fit to appear on the Graham Norton Show, or diplomatic enough to give an address to the United Nations?

Two scenes conclude this odd reflection on the gospel. The first is from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

For our struggle, says the Apostle to the Gentiles who ultimately chopped his head off, is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

And the second is from St Catherine of Sienna, one of the little children alluded to in today’s gospel. Now, she was an extremist. Be who God wants you to be and you will set the world on fire, she says. What St Catherine does not say here is that when you set the world on fire, you will be called a pyromaniac, you will be imprisoned for arson, and your bad behaviour will be used as an example of hate-filled irresponsibility by the media who like to educate us all on the kinds of behaviour that are expected from responsible citizens.

Blog in recess until Low Monday, 28 April

The crooked timber of humanity

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

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Today's gospel (John 12:1-11) is another of those iconic scenes that occur in the last week of Jesus’ life before the crucifixion. At a dinner to honour Jesus at which the recently resurrected Lazarus was in attendance, Mary, Lazarus’s sister, anointed the feet of Jesus with an expensive perfume. Judas Iscariot questions the wisdom of this action, saying that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Blessed are the poor! Jesus chides him for this rebuke, saying that the poor will always be there. The attention garnered by the resurrection of Lazarus draws large crowds, and the chief priests make plans to murder Lazarus so that people will not believe in Jesus.

This scene in the gospel brings to light a paradox that underpins the place of the religion of Jesus Christ in the world. The nearer one draws to the light, the more one is shown up for who one is. The consequence of this paradox is that everyone of us is then required to make a choice about our futures.

Take Judas, for example. Judas was indeed one of the twelve apostles, and his facetious comment about selling the ointment and giving the money to the poor might well have been made by any of the more headstrong followers of Jesus. But at this point, Saint John reveals something about Judas that is rarely mentioned by those who appear to belong to the Judas Fan Club: the kind of people who believe that Judas was well-intentioned and really only wanted to advance the Kingdom when he betrayed his master. The fact is that Judas was a thief. The fact is that Judas was also a liar. The fact is that his thievery and his deceit are carried out right under the nose of a Rabbi whom he well knows can read minds and hearts. The affrontery of the man is unbelievable.

We like to think of Judas as being the one apostle nobody is really akin to, but there is a little bit of Judas in every single one of us. For which one of us is not a thief? If Jesus can call the lusts of the heart adultery, then why should not our envies and jealousies be considered theft, and who is truly free of both envy and jealousy? But in the same way, which one of us is not a liar, and primarily and principally, a liar to ourselves? Driven on by our dissonant needs and entangled by attachments that we barely notice, we still have the temerity to hold ourselves to be if not good Christians, then at least not bad ones, and certainly not as bad as Judas.

Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother, as Charles Baudelaire wrote.

The Judas Fan club would like to defend Judas by attributing to him a clever if wrong-headed plan to get Jesus up to the starting line with the launch of his Kingdom. Here, we will “defend” him only by saying that he was too often the creature of his passions, like every sinful human being. And like so many of us, Judas’s lies and peccadillos became an avalanche of treachery when the going got tough. After all, a man who was stealing from the Apostolic purse could well have had a gambling problem too. But the derisory sum he accepted for Jesus’ betrayal suggests that Jesus’ correction of him in this scene may well have goaded him into retaliation. Yes, there is every sign that Judas was that immature. The Judas Fan Club again likes to assume that his despair arose from the bad consequences of his treason. This blogger argues that his despair might have arisen because he realised how badly damaged he was, and when catastrophe was on him, he did not have the habit of repentance: of facing his actions square on in the light of Jesus, and turning to his Saviour for help. If we are in various ways thieves and liars, let us at least be penitent ones like the good thief.

The other group of people whose inner reality comes to light as we move towards Calvary this week are the chief priests. Swollen with power, having consciences thickened by years of legalistic wrangling, they now propose to murder Lazarus - an action that even the dimmest synagogue student could have told them would make them children of Cain and defilers of God’s law. If they were looking for a moment to rend their garments in grief, the second they conceived this homicidal plan was surely it. It is in this moment that we see their potential defence of acting in sincerity collapse beneath the weight of their utter hypocrisy. The perversity of the plan is all the worse because in addition to plotting against the life of Jesus, they are now plotting against the life of Lazarus whose body gave off the odour of decay before Jesus arrived and restored him to life. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

If there is a little bit of Judas in all of us, please God there is nothing of the chief priests in us. It is on this crooked timber of humanity that Jesus is crucified, but it is also by that sacrifice He redeems the world. How careful we must be to examine our religion honestly and with utter sincerity, the more so if we enjoy any kind of responsibility. What monsters these men had become – what monsters we men can become - while dressed in every sign of piety and given the recognition accorded to the holy. They too were liars, like Judas, but the depth of their depravity arose from their twisting a divine ministry into a tool for power, and not only for power but also for the oppression and destruction of their neighbour. And all this ghastliness is thrown into light, the closer we come this week to Calvary.

What is left for us to do now, other than to gather by the foot of that hill, to strip from our hearts all the lies we wrap around us, to pluck from them the splinters of the world that poison our minds, and so to cast our weary eyes upon the Saviour in whose grace alone we must place our confidence? As we move closer to the light, far be it from us to bury ourselves more deeply in the deceit of the chief priests or the despair of the wretched Judas. Our hearts are diseased but they have a chance to live  a life renewed in this Paschal death and resurrection we are about to take part in.

O Jesus, teach us always to love your truth, even when it shows us to be merchants of deceit. O Jesus, teach us always to love your way, even at the cost of every wayward desire of our crooked hearts.

May Jesus bring us all to love His truth and love His way, that we might share His life forever.

The risks of pied beauty

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

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Today's gospel (John 10:31-42) sees another tense standoff between Jesus and those who accuse Him of blasphemy. As in the gospel of Monday, Jesus moves between argumentation and transcendent revelation. At first, He exchanges arguments with them, questioning why it is a problem for Him to claim to be God when it is written in the Law that they are all gods:

I say, “You are gods,

    children of the Most High, all of you (Psalm 82: 6).

But then, once again, Jesus begins to unpack for His listeners the relationship that He enjoys with the Father, teaching them that He is in the Father and the Father is in him. Lastly, He evades their attempts to arrest Him and crosses the Jordan where many people come to Him and believe in His message.

Our focus on Monday was very much Jesus and His relationship with the Father and the links between the warmth of the Father and the light of the Son. Today, we might dwell instead on the deafness of Jesus’ listeners. For like all human beings, they live in contradiction.

On the one hand, they had seen the works that He had done, and since they had been done in such abundance, it was hard for them to be denied. This was the reality of the situation. People well known to have been crippled for life walked again; men who were born blind were given their sight; those suffering from leprosy - that most devastating of diseases -had been cured and had shown themselves to the priests, as the Law required. Jesus’ argument here was beyond refutation: If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. And who could deny that these actions were a blessing on blighted lives?

On the other hand, some of His listeners could not bear to hear the teachings that these actions were meant to illustrate: that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God; that He claimed to live in the Father as the Father lived in Him; that He knew the Father and the Father knew Him. All this was, as I say, unbearable blasphemy, as far as these people were concerned. They even took up stones to inflict on Him the punishment reserved for blasphemers and would gladly have seen Him arrested. There is no end to the hostility against Him, even though the works He was doing were undeniable.

In essence, the problem that these people have is a lack of docibilitas – teachability. They have eyes but do not see, they have ears but do not listen. Even though the entire Law has taught them to anticipate the fulfilment of a promise from God to send a Messiah, what shocks them are not the extraordinary works of their Messiah but the gap between their own understanding and this new revelation that He brings them. This new situation requires them to let go of something; And yet the way they cling to God's previous gifts prevents them from doing what they should. And this clinging on is a blockage that only grace can remove.

Jesus brings the fullness of revelation, and the Holy Spirit was sent to the Church to unfold that revelation. This is why it is impossible to urge Christians to accept novel doctrines on the basis that they should not cling on to their own views. We do not cling to an old covenant; we cling to Christ. As Pope Benedict put it, handing on the faith is a matter of continuity and not rupture. This doctrinal understanding is in fact a deeply spiritual insight, for God is both truth and love right through, and we cannot separate them, even though these things are a mystery to us. It is for this reason that Saint Paul told the Galatians that even though an angel from heaven should preach to them a new gospel, they must not believe it: not because they needed to cling to their own views but because Christ had already come.

Nevertheless, it is possible for us back-sliding humans to hold the fullness of revelation with less than the gentle and grateful hands that we should have. It is possible for us to fail to discern; it is possible for us to close our eyes to the marvellous workings of grace because we are hostile to those on whom those graces are being showered. How else can we explain the sometimes vile and vicious behaviour and attitudes shown by people who should know better towards their fellow Catholics? How many minds are closed by jealousy? How many ears are stopped up because others are blessed when we seem not to be? How many stones are picked up and hurled at our brothers and sisters because we do not believe in the good works that they are doing?

Here is another way then in which docibilitas must be developed. There are many paths of holiness in the Church. This is a fact that does not point to a limitation in ourselves but to the marvellous, fruitful, and abundant diversity of the richness of Christ.

The lesson of Gerard Manley Hopkins is evergreen:

 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him. 

The warmth of the Father, the light of the Son

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

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Today’s gospel (John 8: 12-20) sees another of these enigmatic exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees. Again, Jesus was in the Temple. Again, we see Him wrestle in disputation with his enemies. Again, He makes bold claims - that He is the light of the world; that the Father who sent Him bears witness of him - and again, He meets with incomprehension. He cites the Jewish law according to which the testimony of two people is true. But His words are not comprehended, and His interlocutors want to know where the Father who sent Him is. The scene ends with Jesus continuing to teach in the treasury of the Temple, as yet unmolested further by the authorities. This truce will not last for long.

Jesus seems to move between two different modes of speaking in this scene. On the one hand, His words are transcendent and mysterious: what were people to think of His claim that He was the light of the world? What were people to think of His assertion that those who follow Him will not walk in darkness? At the other end of this gospel scene, we find Jesus at his most rabbinical, engaging in a dispute with the Pharisees where He cites their law in order to underpin His own claims. In a sense, this latter part of the scene shows Jesus trying to meet the Pharisees ‘where they are at’, as we say these days. These men lived in a culture of legal disputation and argument; how were they to be led to the truth except through this kind of reasoning? Saint John gives us no indication of how persuasive the Pharisees found Jesus’ approach, other than that they disputed His words; we know some of them, like Nicodemus, had open hearts and minds, but we also know that others were intent on persecuting Him. More especially at this point, we do not know how Jesus’ more transcendent teachings were received. Nicodemus had struggled to understand Him when they had their meeting at night.

There are two other scenes in the gospel of Saint John that can reveal the inner meaning of this particular passage. The first is found in the opening of St. John's gospel, and it is worth quoting in full:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

We see now that when Jesus called Himself the light of the world in chapter 8, He was in the same moment calling Himself the life of the world. Why are these two metaphors bound so closely together? For the simple reason that the life that draws us towards itself must necessarily cast light on the path He wants us to walk. To share oneself, as God wishes to do with us, is to share the truth of oneself: to share who one really is. This is the light. Life – the whole process of living – is thereafter to become like the one who has loved us: be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Life is not meant to be a static museum display or a trophy cabinet to impress our neighbour; only our innate worldliness makes us think and behave in that way. Life rather is a journey, both for those of us who profess a belief in the light and for those of us who believe it is only fundamentally a meaningless game. For those of us who believe in the light, it is a journey in hope to the eternal home He offers us; for those who refuse His light, it is an as yet unfinished journey away from hope towards a definitive destiny of despair: abandon hope, all ye who enter here, as Dante puts over the gateway into the circles of Hell. As long as the journey is not over, there is still a chance of escaping the black hole of damnation which, unlike black holes in our universe, has no power over the light:

 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

If we turn from these transcendent openings of the scene to the last rabbinical disputation, we can also find further illumination in another part of St John’s gospel, most especially in the discourse after the Last Supper. Again, let us read this in full:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.

Jesus here explains to the apostles two mysteries: the first, which He affirms without further ado is that He is the Son of the Father. The idea that God has a Son was unknown to the Jews, although it is hinted at in several Old Testament scriptures. But even then, even when that idea is encompassed, there is another mystery to behold in their relationship:  I am in the Father and the Father is in me. The relationship, made in Chapter 8 into a rabbinical argument about two bearing witness, is seen here in its full beauty: the sonship of Jesus and the paternity of the Eternal Father are not like any son-father relationship; rather, they are like two dimensions of the same reality.

Light has two qualities: brightness and warmth: behold the light of the Son who illuminates every man coming into the world, and in that light the consubstantial warmth of the Father who offers through His Son’s death adoption into the reality of His family; both carried to us by the luminous Holy Spirit, communicating the warmth of the Father and the brightness of the Son through the radiation of His being. And this is why Jesus concludes his words to the Pharisees: If you knew me, you would know my Father also.

O weary, weary is the world

But here the world’s desire.

Throughout the terrible passion to come, this unity of Son and Father remains the transcendent mystery in the bloody awful pain, the eternal gift in the hours of suffering. To receive the warmth of the Father and to open our eyes to the light of the Son, all that remains for us to do now is to say our fiat in union with Him and with Mary, spouse of the Holy Spirit. 

Living for whose glory?

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

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Today’s gospel (John 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30) sees Jesus apparently deciding not to go to Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles, but then to go in private. While He is there, He has a discussion with the people who wonder whether He is the Christ. Jesus responds to their concerns, saying that while they know Him, they do not know why He has come. In the end, even though the authorities wanted to arrest him, no one touched him because His hour had not yet come. If you struggle to connect with today's gospel, do not be surprised. The editors of the lectionary were rather too heavy-handed and took out some of its key ingredients. But let us set that aside to focus rather on what happens in this seventh chapter of the gospel of Saint John.

In the edited version of the gospel, we cannot see why Jesus apparently decided not to go to Jerusalem. But in the full version, His reasoning is very clear: My time is not yet here […] the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. I think it was Fulton Sheen who first identified the religion of “nice”, the diplomatic fiction that because Jesus tells us not to judge, we are, therefore, under an obligation to think that everybody has good intentions. But the obligation not to judge concerns our view of a person's internal guilt or innocence before Almighty God. It is not an obligation to be naïve, or even worse, to behave as if every person we meet is not in fact a battlefield in one way or another. Even people who are apparently mature in all sorts of ways may have any number of private struggles that we are not the witness of. In a similar way, no matter the good elements in other denominations or religions, diminishment or denial of the truth is necessarily diminishment or denial of Christ who is the truth. It’s time to get over the ball and chain of naïve niceness, and to stop missing the wood for the trees.

But now we see the force of Jesus’ logic. There will be a time for Him to face the hatred of His persecutors, those who hate Him, but He intends to calculate carefully when that encounter comes. Discretion is the better part of valour. Fools rush in. We should not underestimate the disease of ill-will that broods more or less in the heart of every human being under the yoke of original sin. Why is Jesus hated? Simply because He threatens to stand between the world and what it desires. If we are in the divine will, then we are at peace, even if every war comes to our doorstep. If we are not in the divine will, if our wills are not reconciled with the ways of the Eternal Father, then we are not a peace, even if we cannot move for our friendships and peace treaties with the rest of the world. Fake peace and fake love are the sordid disguises of human self-deceit.

One question people ask about this chapter in the gospel of Saint John is whether Jesus lied. For He says that He will not go up to the festival because His time has not yet come, but then He goes. Jesus clearly intends to go, so why does He tell them He will not go? Some say this is an instance of Jesus making what moralists call a mental reservation; it is not a lie but a way of disguising what He is about to do from those who have no right to know. It is perfectly legitimate to do this with those who are persecuting us. As for changing His mind, why should Jesus avoid appearing to have changed His mind when He did not avoid the other burdens and limitations of the human condition?

There is one final mystery in the last section of the gospel which concerns why Jesus insists that He has not come of His own accord: He who sent me is true, and Him you do not know. I know Him and I come from Him and He sent me. It is not obvious on the face of it why this was such an important thing to say. Clearly, it caused consternation, for the gospel concludes by observing that the authorities were seeking to arrest Jesus. But what is the deeper reason for Jesus insisting that He has been sent, that He has a mission?

For that, we must go back to an earlier section of the chapter when Jesus brings before the crowd’s attention the point of conflict that lies in the heart of every human being. There, he says:

Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but He who seeks the glory of the one who sent Him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about Him.

The deeper reality of our lives is that everything is a gift, most especially our very being. We do not speak on our own. We do not live on our own or for ourselves. We have been sent from God and we are called to return to God. This is the meaning of our lives. A life that is fulfilled is one that is shaped by God's call and by God's sufficiency; true fulfilment cannot come from the things of this world, no matter how wonderful they are. The only true self-fulfilment is to find in God our purpose and our being and to enjoy all His gifts only insofar as they are a reflection of His love: whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory. If this is so, is it not the case that everyone who acts on their own, i.e. who acts to seek purely their own purposes and ends is committed only to themselves? The seductive language of self-realisation is actually a hymn to our own self frustration and loss.

In a way, realising this is the very purpose of the season of Lent: to hear again the words of the Lord spoken by the prophet Joel:

Yet even now, says the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

With all our heart… not leaving shards of it buried in the things of this world. In hearing this call, we make ourselves men and women of truth, like Jesus in this gospel scene. We conform ourselves to His mission and in some ways share in it because, as we know, we are called to live so that Jesus might live in us.

O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord in every moment of our lives. O Mary, teach us always to speak and act not for our own personal glory but for the glory of the one who calls us.