The risks of pied beauty

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

*****

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.