Sorrow-joy, absence-presence, Friday-Sunday

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

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Today’s gospel (John 16: 20-23a) snatches us from the ecstasy of yesterday’s feast of the Ascension and brings us back down to earth with a stark warning from Jesus during his discourse after the Last Supper: Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. The comfort will come, He tells the Apostles, but it will not come quickly. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. This is in fact the essence of this scriptural extract: first the pain, later the reward, just as in the pangs of childbirth. Thus far the words of today’s holy gospel.

This gospel message is challenging for us for perhaps two reasons. First, it reminds us of that perennial truth of Christianity: first the fast, then the feast. The ways of the world put these realities in the reverse order: Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you will die. In contrast, Christianity tells us: die to yourself today to live to Christ tomorrow. First, our Good Friday, then our Easter Sunday.  The challenge here for us is the deferral of satisfaction and pleasure, the avoidance of pain and sorrow. Right now, however, because of our call to follow Him, there is a test to be faced, a burden to be carried, or let us simply call it our cross. It is rather as the words of Sirach remind us: My child, when you enter the service of the Lord, prepare yourself for tribulation. We were baptised in the name of a Man God nailed to the most feared instrument of torture in the Roman world: why on earth do we struggle to bear in mind the implications of this fact?

There is an answer to that conundrum but let us consider now the second reason that we find this fast-first message of Christianity challenging: it asks us to counteract our natural human instinct to want to harmonise ourselves emotionally with our fellow humans wedded to the feast-first philosophy. As we noted on Monday, our taste for cordiality can be misleading. What is there to worry about, the world asks us. The world often hates Christian values, but it hates even more our failure to share its sympathies and rejoice in its Ode to Joy. But that is because its joys are only sometimes those of the Christians. As Jesus foretells it: Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. We have to face this separation. We are no longer running with the herd.

There is a balance to be struck here. I can share my atheist neighbour’s joy in the sound of children playing. On the other hand, I simply cannot share his joy at successfully hiding his adultery from his wife. We are caught here on the horns of a dilemma: fail to rejoice in his vice and risk being thought po-faced, or accompany him in his joyful debauchery because – you know, even adultery has a shadow of love and adventure about it – but then find ourselves oddly isolated from the Lord in a place we can no longer call home. Where then is the true joy and where the true cause for lament?

So, why do we struggle to bear in mind the implications of the cross? Why do we find the calls of the world for fellow sympathy to be so strong? Each and every one of us must face this question and grapple with our own answer. Is it a lack of conversion on our part, the failure to cast our eyes habitually on the cross at the start of our day to remind ourselves of the desperate measures that our actions have called forth from our Redeemer? Is it too little readiness for self-denial, a commitment only to the bare minimum, leaving us dangerously within the gravitational orbit of weaknesses that are excusable but the gateway to greater betrayals? Do we resist the lamentation that must perforce arise from putting to death not only our vices but our self-oriented search for gratification even within our religion? Are we too often the dupe of an all-too-human readiness for self-congratulation?

But perhaps we cannot give a just answer to such questions without having first considered the true measure of all joy and lamentation: the fiat in joy and the fiat in sorrow to which our charism in COLW invites us. Joy and sorrow are themselves human passions, known to almost all members of the human race. Within God’s plan, however, they must be understood in relation to the gifts of God that have transformed our human destiny. Humanity is fallen: this is only a tragedy if we consider peace with God as the very purpose of our existence. At that point, every step closer to that peace is paradoxically a reason for joy, even if that step involves our sorrow and lamentations. Conversely, if God is the very purpose of our existence, every step away from eternal joy is a cause for sorrow, even if the short-term reward is a wayward pleasure or indulgence.

If then we say yes to lamentation in the name of Christ, we are in fact celebrating joy in the long run, a joy that is unending and that nobody may take from us. This passage should send us back to a much earlier one in the gospels of St Matthew and St Mark:

And Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

But here we see again the paradox, not only of Christian sorrow and joy, but also of Jesus’ presence and absence. For the Apostles must fast when He leaves them; fast in the concrete sense of undergoing penance, as well as in the metaphorical sense of bearing with being deprived of His presence. Yet at the same time, He will assure them: Behold I am with you always, even to the end of the world, absent and yet present, near but yet far, distant and still intimately with us. We can no more separate joy and sorrow in a Christian sense than we can separate this paradox of His presence and His absence. There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday, but Good Friday has no purpose without an Easter Sunday.

Sorrow minus Christian joy turns us into po-faced sourpusses, governed by the logic of perfection rather than union with God, the Eternally Joyful One. Joy minus Christian sorrow leaves us bland and tasteless, unable to stand for anything that requires our resistance: the 0% salt of the compromised Christian. We must hold this paradox of joy and sorrow together, as did Mary our mother and our model, a heart pieced with the swords of loss and compassion whose joys were, nevertheless, so exquisite she dwelt on them all her days. When we behold Him like Mary did, we will ask nothing more of Him for to behold Him is to be joyful forever.

A word to the servants

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

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 26-16:4a) continues once more the thoughts of Jesus during his discourse at the Last Supper. He promises that He will send the Holy Spirit. He tells them these things so that they might not fall away, and He also promises that they will undergo persecution. Once again in the gospel, we find ourselves before a world of thought in just a few lines of type any one of which could be meat for our meditation. But let us focus here on these awful lines: the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering a service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. What are we to make of such lines?

First, if we do find ourselves the object of persecution, we should not be surprised. Jesus has foretold these things. In fact, He had said just a few moments before this extract: If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. We do not like to think about this reality. It is not just the suffering. It is human to want to be liked. It is very human to think that one earns cordiality by being cordial oneself. But that is a norm for getting on in the world, not for being Christian. To love without the expectation or aim of making oneself loved is to love with a freedom worthy of a child of God, to pour ourselves out like God who lets the sun shine on the good and on the wicked. To be cordial without seeking the coinage of being respected or admired or sought after: this is when our cordiality can really serve the gospel. For souls moved by grace, we can then be a symbol or channel of the love of God; for souls angry with God, we might find ourselves a ready and visible object of that anger. Jesus called Himself a sign of contradiction, and wherever He is, His servants must be there too.

But why should those who kill the apostles think they are doing a service to God? And what are we to make of the fact that Jesus says they do not know the Father? There are scandals in these words, stumbling blocks on which we might fall. Most especially, we have to face the fact that is it is perfectly possible for people who are apparently godly to do dreadfully wicked things in the name of God. But this is a strain upon our systems. It is difficult to suffer at the hands of people whose actions are patently evil. How much more difficult is it to suffer at the hands of people who appear to be good! And how is it that people who appear to be good can do such evil? If the question matters more to us, it is not least because we are trying ourselves to be good. We want to be where our master is and carry our cross after him.

Good people do evil things for various reasons. In the first place, they persuade themselves that something evil is in fact good. The Pharisees are perhaps a useful case study for this habit. Their problem was not only that they were challenged by Jesus’ teachings on the minutiae of the Law; it was also that in following the Law and in loading its burdens on others, they did so hypocritically. Convinced of their own justice, their hearts had swollen with vices they had hardly noticed: pride and arrogance, anger, cruelty, indifference. It is a strange function of religious organisations that they often turn a blind eye to the vices of their leaders. This is a herd instinct, for protecting the leader seems like protecting the herd. But in a Christian context, it is a disaster. This is why when Peter committed his prevarication over the following of the Jewish law in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul did not simply lie down and take it. He tells the Galatians that he withstood Peter to the face: this was a stand-up row, and while Saint Peter's ministry was to feed the flock, this did not absolve Saint Paul or any other apostle from their own commitment to state the truth. St Peter’s prevarication suggests another reason for why good people do the wrong thing: it is simply weakness on their part.

But there is yet a third reason for why good people would do evil things, and that is when the thing they do is good in fact, but their intention in their hearts is wayward. We might say this is the most dangerous place of all for the disciple. For while the action before them is good in itself, there can be something disordered in their own wills; heaven forfend that it is something that they are conscious of, but we all have unconscious needs that we must become more aware of if we are to make progress in the ways of Jesus. Lord save me from my secret sins, prays David in the Psalms, but it is not just our sins that can be secret, but our deepest motives as well. The French philosopher Pascal is remembered for many things not the least of which is this piece of wisdom: the heart has its reasons which reason does not know. When those who are striving to be good do evil or do good with a wayward intention, it is a sign to us to remember that we are all living and breathing in a world of disorder from which only the grace of Christ can rescue us. The secret desire for respect, the desire for gratification, the demands of anxiety: any one of these forces and others can surge through the heart and leave their poisonous seed on a good deed, there to bring forth its bitter fruit, perhaps with the help of the demonic sower of wickedness. The lesson for us is stark: while the fallen human heart is still capable of choosing the right thing, it can never be truly healed without the life of Christ. And even when that life of Christ is within us, we remain broken and fragmented vessels. Unless we know ourselves in such terms, unless we know ourselves to be this compromised, how can we ever truly know the Father who has had pity on us?

In COLW, we are the anawim of the Lord, the little ones on whom He has had pity. This is the reality that might help us not fall away, becoming victims of our own best intentions. Should we not then polish our haloes a little less and our souls a little more? There is deep work to do. Let us not be proud: the just man falls seven times a day. Let us not despair: for God writes straight with crooked lines, and in the end, even if we do the right thing we must remember these words of the Lord: ‘We are worthless servants; we have done only what we ought to have done!’ And perhaps only in the heavy and creaking wheels of humiliation can we be made into the ground meal which the waters of grace transform into a new Eucharistic elevation.

 

 

The law of love of the Lord of love

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

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 12-17) is one of those extracts that we will hopefully be meditating on for the rest of our lives, so rich is it with the teachings of Jesus and glimpses into His very heart. Love one another as I have loved you… no longer do I call you servants… you did not choose me, but I chose you… whatever you ask the Father in my name, He will give it to you. Any one of these phrases or sentences would be meat enough for our reflection but let us focus here on just one.

The new commandment, the mandatum novum, is most associated with the celebrations of Holy Thursday: this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. We use the word agenda to mean the things that must be done, but this sentence contains the Christian’s agenda and the Christian’s contemplanda: the things the Christian must contemplate. As I have loved you. How has the Lord loved us? We need only look on the events of the incarnation to have an inkling of what that love has been like. Thirty-three years in total, thirty hidden and three in public, the hidden years as much a source for our reflection since they mirror the long and mostly uneventful lives that many of us lead; thirty years of family life, quiet labour, celebrations, the adventures of youth, climbing trees and swimming rivers, Passover nights, a carpenter's workshop, the loss of a beloved stepfather… What was Jesus doing in all these years, as He laid His hand upon the wood in his stepfather’s workshop or as He looked upon the flocks of sheep on the hills around Nazareth, except loving us, casting His eye upon the passing beggar or the distant leper like He casts His eye upon all of sorry humanity, loving these damaged children from the very depths of His heart? What was He doing as He offered His daily prayers to the Father if not lifting up each and every one of us to the loving and forgiving gaze of the Blessed Trinity, to beg for mercy and reconciliation, peace and unity, the restoration of all things in Himself? As I have loved you, He says to the disciples, with the enduring and eternal faithfulness of their Lord and Creator. We cannot come to the end of this mystery. Please God, if we do our bit, we will be contemplating it for the rest of eternity, gazing back in love on the One who first loved us. These are our contemplanda now and always. When we stand on the edge of prayer, unable to take another step forward, or blocked from entrance by the noisy clamour of a restless mind, perhaps we can at least console ourselves that behind the noise or beyond the dry silence lies this limpid, sweet, life-giving mystery of how the Lord has loved us.

But the wonder of this gospel extract is far from over. Now we turn to the new commandment itself: love one another, and - now you know how I love you - love one another as I have loved you. If the phrase as I have loved you told us unending truths about the Man-God Himself, this new commandment tells us two things: first, it tells us what to do, but second, it also tells us who we are.

Every philosophy of life is governed by some norm, an agenda, or some key duty. For the Christian, after loving God, that norm is to love one another. There is a misapprehension going around that the social doctrine of the Church was not developed until the late nineteenth century when Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. Well, Leo's letter applied that social doctrine to the socio-economic circumstances of the time, but it did not found or launch the social doctrine of the Church, far from it. The social doctrine of the Church has been there since the time of the Apostles when the first Christians shared their possessions amongst themselves, literally living out the laws of charity not only towards God but to fellow believers and to unbelievers beyond the community. Over many centuries, this new commandment of love took on a more structured form, and was known even until quite recently under the guise of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the grieving: these were all spiritual works of mercy, ways in which the new commandment was made concrete and real in the circumstances of everyday life. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick: these too were acts of love that Christians could perform in obedience to this new commandment to love one another as He had loved us. To paraphrase Chesterton, this commandment has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and often left untried or neglected. The western world in some ways excels still in this residual obedience to the law of love for it was not paganism or secularism that taught us to care for those in need but the Christian conscience. At the same time, how did westerners ever learn to feed the hungry they see on the TV but neglect, ignore or even loathe the neighbours who live down their own street, or the folk they meet in daily life? On Monday, the gospel invited us to contemplate that great outpouring of the Blessed Trinity that takes form in our souls through the indwelling. This new commandment tells us simply that this outpouring of grace into our hearts is not meant to stop there but to flow through us, making us as it were channels of life to others. As the goodness of God shares itself, so we too are commanded to share ourselves, perhaps even in the most extreme circumstances to the very shedding of our blood. This duty of self-giving will never end, and if it did, it would be a sign that God was no longer God.

And yet, this new commandment is not done with teaching us things. For the second thing which comes to our mind as we contemplate it is how far below its standards we fall. When did any of us truly love our neighbour as Jesus has loved us? When did any of us ever cast on them an eye enlightened by such immense charity? We have cited before on this blog the words of Solzhenitsyn: pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig. It does this because we humans do not know ourselves, or because we regularly forget who we are. We lie down for the night and rise the following day, often having forgotten the lessons the Lord has so carefully taught us. Our hearts were inflamed, but they have cooled again. The lights we received appear to have dimmed, and we are left only with that fake illumination that wants to remind us of what decent and talented people we are, or else - if we are that way inclined - of how exceptionally bad and useless we are: both judgements, the positive and the negative, skewed by our failure to reconnect again with the Lord of love and the law of love; both judgements proof positive that we have not yet ceded the throne of our hearts to the Lord who loved us so much that He laid down his life for us.

So, this new commandment teaches us about Him, about ourselves as we are, and about ourselves as He intends us to be. The only thing left for us to do now is to assess how much of these teachings we can recall from yesterday, and decide whether today we will learn and live them anew.

Channels of communion

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

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Today’s gospel (John 14:21-26) continues the love letter which we have been reading in recent days from Jesus to his disciples, the discourse at the Last Supper. Now, the Lord turns to the indwelling of the Trinity in the hearts of His faithful servants: if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. It is in this scene also that Jesus assures the disciples that the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, will come to them later to help them remember all His teachings.

This is one of those passages in the gospel that need to be understood correctly, or rather, that can be easily misunderstood and taken incorrectly. And because it is as vital to avoid error as to weed the garden, these things are worth dwelling on for a while.

First, Jesus says: Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. To reinforce this message, He subsequently says: Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. It is in such passages that we realise the so-called plain sense of scripture is not at all plain. Do we all keep the commandments? No! If this is so, do we even love the Lord? Or if we do not keep His word, how can we say we love Him? Taken in this way, these words would be a reason for our despair. This is where the plain sense of scripture would be, so to speak, plain silly. Peter loved the Lord, and yet he denied Him. None of the apostles but John stood firm at the hour of the trial, and yet they all still loved him. So, what does the Lord mean?

The truth is that the more we love the Lord, the more we become like Him. He could work this transformation in a miraculous way, but it is only rare exceptions in the lives of the Saints that show such overnight metamorphoses. Usually, the transformation happens over time. There is an apprenticeship to serve. There is a time of learning to be undergone. We have the map, but we have not walked the journey. We know the destination, but we are not yet there. We can console ourselves with other words of the Lord. The just man falls seven times a day. This is good for our humility and good for our patience. It teaches us not only about ourselves and our real condition, and how grateful we should be to the Lord of all, but also about the struggles and difficulties of others who never even seem to come close to the Lord. How could we take pity on them if we had not known in some way their bitterness and limitations?

One other mistake that we might make as we read this gospel is to think that it is because of our action, our fidelity, that the Blessed Trinity will come to dwell with us: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. But again, this is where the plain sense of scripture would mislead us. The gift of the indwelling is not merchandise that we can barter for with a few coupons of good behaviour. In the one instant of eternity from the mystery of which the Blessed Trinity knew our creation, our fall, our redemption, and our sanctification, all of these things were a gift, not an entitlement. This indwelling comes not in return for our mere questionable fidelity. Even if through and in Christ, we merit grace, that we merit is itself a gift, for only Christ merits in the strict sense of the word.

This gift of the indwelling, to be made a house for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:: this gift comes out of His goodness towards us, for goodness must share itself. This logic is captured in the words of a hymn penned by St Francis Xavier that are worth quoting in one of the original Latin versions, for the sheer beauty and simplicity of the words:

Nec præmii ullius spe;

Sed sicut tu amasti me

Sic amo et amabo te,

Solum quia Rex meus es,

Et solum, quia Deus es.

Not for the hope of any reward, but just as you have loved me.

Thus I love and will love you,

Only because you are my God

Only because you are God.

 

To receive this gift is to be lifted up into another life in which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, that love between them being nothing other than the person of the Spirit. Here is where our calling to be like Christ takes on another breathtaking level, for just as the humanity of Christ, united to the person of the Son, was a dwelling place for the Trinity on earth, so through grace, we are united to these three persons, the One God, and are enabled even now to live with them in the secret chamber of our souls. The Father who begets the Son from eternity and the Son who is the perfect image of the Father, live in the unending rapture of love that is the Spirit and will that their human creatures share now on earth this inner living presence, and later see in glory the everlasting banquet of conviviality – a word that means literally a living together. This is the pearl of great price. This is everlasting life: to share in their joy. This is the ultimate fruit of our redemption.

When Mary said ‘yes’ to the angel, she was not just saying ‘yes’ to being a mother. She was reworking the original disobedience of Eve that introduced such dissonance into human existence, and blending it again with the harmony of the eternal Trinity. She, Mary, is the one who has kept the commandments, and thus the one in whom the Trinity dwells, and in whom the Son can take flesh and step into this fallen world for its recovery.

We can always fall; let us be humble. But if we are faithful, faithful to this inner life, what miracles of grace might we yet help unleash upon the world, what miracles of love and unity might not be wrought with our cooperation! For having come to share in this living, raging torrent of the Trinity’s life, how could we not become channels of His living waters for others?

And then we can collectively echo Mary too. Fiat nobis secundum verbum tuum : let it be done to us Lord, according to your word.

 

 

Christ the way

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

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Today’s gospel (John 14:1-6) takes us into the heart of the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. This short passage contains some of Jesus’ best-known counsels and teachings: Let not your heart be troubled…In my Father’s house are many rooms…Where I am, you may be also. Thomas questions Him, alleging that they do not know the way to where He is going. Jesus replies: I am the way, the truth, and the life.

On the eve of His passion, these are the last words of Jesus to His closest friends; not yet His deathbed wishes, which will come tomorrow from what some Fathers of the Church call the marriage bed of the cross. But this discourse is His last love letter as it were. He speaks above all in this passage to the anxieties the disciples have and that they will have in the future. How many of them in their final agony – hanging from a cross or awaiting an executioner’s sword – found their minds crossing the years back to that candle-lit room to hear the words of their Master: Let not your heart be troubled…I go to prepare a place for you.

Jesus stands on the edge of eternity, not just in His ascension but in every moment of His life. In the highest part of His soul, He contemplates the Beatific Vision, even while remaining a wayfarer in this life, a man of ancient Palestine, a villager from a disreputable hole called Nazareth. And He speaks to us now, encouraging us also to see the people and events around us from the perspective of eternity, not time. Eternity belongs to God alone, so what does it mean to see things in the light of eternity if not to see them in the light of God?

What then holds any of us back – the wanton sinner, the proudest Pharisee, and the clownish servant of the Lord – if not our all-too-human habit of calculating rather than contemplating? Calculation is a good servant but a terrible master; it is a tool of prudence and a tyrant over wisdom. We are called to love but only God is love right through, and until we are again in His hands after our own last journey, we must battle against those forces in us that urge us to take control.

Now, what does Thomas’s question mean if it is not a request for empowerment? How can we know the way? he inquires. He could easily have said: what must we do? Or rather, Give us the tools. After all, what is a man without a plan? When we contrast this question with his first words, there is almost a note of irony to his complaint: Lord, we do not know where you are going. He might equally have said: Stop being so mysterious, would you, Jesus? Isn’t that what we tell Jesus constantly: Stop being so mysterious, Jesus! Tell us what you are up to.

And thus comes Jesus’ reply:

I am the way, the truth, and the life. The message, the agenda for the Christian, is not self-gratifying empowerment but encounter with Christ. Jesus is the way. Every wrong step, as we calculate our own coordinates, is a departure from that path. It is easy to point to the great sinner who has tangibly stepped off the path; but we are all at it, we fallen human beings, lapsing back into calculation, trying to do something, unmindful of how our actions can become a kind of self-sufficiency, shored up unconsciously by crystal-clear norms in the reflection of which we labour to find our own image. And then when Jesus requires us to be most dependent on Him for His glory, He finds us most dependent on ourselves.

To follow Jesus is to be like Him and to be not like Him. Perhaps we focus too much on the former and not enough on the latter. We must be perfect, He says, as our Heavenly Father is perfect. But when He says I am the way, the truth and the life, woe betide us if we echo Him literally, saying, I am called to be like Jesus, so I too am the way, the truth, and the life.

He must increase and we must decrease. 

Christ the door

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

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Today’s gospel (John 10: 1-10) gives us a parable that is so strange, so abstruse, that when the people did not understand what He was saying to them, Jesus actually explained its meaning. In fact, it is less a parable and more a figure or metaphor. In it, Jesus evokes a sheepfold in which the shepherd would keep his sheep. The sheepfold has a door by which the shepherd passes in and out, whereas thieves and robbers climb in another way. The sheep know the shepherd and will follow his voice but not the voice of strangers.

When these metaphors land not so much on deaf ears as on bewildered ones, Jesus explains His meaning or at least elucidates it a little more. I am the door of the sheep, He says. All who came before me are thieves and robbers. The sheep find pasture through me whereas the thief only comes to destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

This extract from the gospel weaves together two truths which are central to our spiritual lives: the truth of Jesus as our saviour and the truth of our dependence on Him. There are many robbers and thieves who would take our souls. There are thieves in the material domain: wealth, popularity, beauty, success, recognition, bigger houses, job security, the affection of friends, holidays in the sun, the list could go on and on. It is not that we consciously make these things our saviours, but something in us makes one or other of them indispensable to us.  Wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be also. But there are also thieves in the spiritual domain, the chief of these being the devil himself. But he is not the only one. Any ideology, philosophy, religion, or denomination that opposes in any way the fullness of the truth of Jesus is in some respect a thief and a robber. The seeds of the Word that exist in the world are usually wrapped in parasitical growths and weeds, just as the words of the parable teach us: Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. It is worthwhile remembering that such growths and weeds are also part of the life of the Church, though in a different way. The Church is a place of shepherds and sheep, but there are also wolves, and even worse, there are hirelings. The sometimes-cosy or mystical language that we hear about the Church’s internal affairs needs to be weighed against the realism that the gospels offer us. And before the enthusiasts go wild over the latest lapel badges, proclaiming us to be a missionary Church, a synodal Church or some other kind of Church, we would do well to remember the value of the label of the militant Church which reminded us that, attired in the armour of God which St Paul explains to us, we are at war until we die in the hope of sharing in the victory that Christ has already won. We are at war precisely with the thieves and robbers that Jesus speaks of today in the gospel. Indeed, we are at war with ourselves: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Yet when the centrality of Christ is established in us, the spiritual combat which is the rhythm of our lives is accompanied by a melody and descant on which our souls can feed. For again in today's gospel we hear: If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. What does it mean to go in by the door which is Christ? Surely this action evokes for us the contemplative dimension of our charism in COLW. We retreat from the world into the cell of our souls where we can converse with God, come to knowledge of ourselves, and so cast ourselves upon His mercy. Every day that we do not go through this door and into this sheepfold of Christ-knowledge and self-knowledge is a day when we have left our own doors open to thieves and robbers.

And how many thieves and robbers there are! Allow me a short tangent here. We do not yet know much about our new Pope Leo XIV but we do know that when he spoke at the Synod on the New Evangelization in 2012, he was most concerned about the power and influence of the media culture in which the vast majority of us live: thieves and robbers in so many ways. And we do know that when he addressed the Cardinals on Friday last week, one of the reasons he gave for choosing the name of Leo was that just as Leo XIII had faced one industrial revolution (the second industrial revolution and not the first, as so much of the media has wrongly stated), so, today we face another industrial revolution, powered by the extraordinary technologies of artificial intelligence. And it is in keeping with his Augustinian background not to simply smile benignly, as if these forces came without risks, but to be aware of the eternal drama that underpins all our material affairs, pitched as they are between the two loves that have built two cities, in Saint Augustine's extraordinarily evocative image.

To return to our theme, however, only when we have been into that sheepfold, listened to the voice of Christ and become aware of our own weaknesses can we pass out through the door which is Christ and into the world to be about the business of the Father. Then and only then can we share in that abundant life that Christ intended to give us and which the thieves and robbers would snatch from our hands. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, says Jesus who welcomes us into His heart, the pasture of our souls. 

The meat of the matter

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

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Today's gospel (John 6: 52-59) gives us more words of Christ upon the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jesus says these words in the synagogue at Capernaum, so in front of a very motley assortment of listeners. They are not words spoken in private but in the full glare of publicity.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, He says - undoubtedly to the astonishment of the audience.

He references the Jewish memory of the feeding of the people of God in the desert with manna. But He notes that they all died, whereas those that feed on His flesh will live forever.

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To cite again the words of Flannery O'Connor,

You will know the truth and the truth will make you strange.

Imagine the bewilderment of those who listened to this sermon of Jesus. Those who lived in Capernaum knew Jesus best of all, but surely with this one He had them flummoxed. Was this man who spoke so beautifully about God as the Father in heaven some kind of secret cannibal? Was He really just a pagan for who but the pagans consumed blood? We cannot get a sense of how these words were received without understanding the taboos that Jesus was breaking - not just human taboos but religious ones as well.

Men cannot take too much reality, says T.S. Eliot, and undoubtedly there is something very real in the need for pre-evangelization. And yet, as we see here, sometimes Jesus simply speaks the truth into the universe with full confidence, knowing that He is only the sower. The drama of redemption moves to its second act not with the preacher’s flattering words or diplomatic speech, but only when the heart of the listener recognises some responsibility that must be assumed. In other words, these shocking truths that we read in the gospel were accompanied by actual graces from the heart of Christ as they reached the hearts of the assembly. Those who preach the gospel cannot evaluate their effectiveness simply on the basis of how many people embrace their message. That is a far too human-centred view of evangelization. If we wish to speak of Christ to others, of His shocking doctrines, and if we wish others to hear, then our labour must be built on the foundation of prayer and sacrifice, as was that of Jesus. In the 19th century, two priests from England went to visit St John Marie Vianney, the famous and holy parish priest of the village of Ars, north of Lyons, to ask his advice:

We have preached and tried to spread the word, but nothing seems to work, they complained. What should we do?

Did you fast and do penance? the saint replied. Did you take the discipline? Did you sleep on the floor?

We do not know what these English priests did, but we do know that the parish priest of Ars is known the world over as the patron of pastors. The mistake of these priests was to think in purely worldly terms about the effectiveness of their preaching, and this is one of the observations that we can make today about this gospel. In purely human terms, the doctrine of the Eucharist is simply dropped on the heads of these listeners, so why should they believe it? While the words simply belong to the material universe that we occupy, the power that brings any soul to Christ belongs to God. The preacher might be better off spending fifteen minutes writing his sermon and forty-five minutes on his knees before the Tabernacle, just as Jesus’ sermons and parables stood upon a foundation of nights spent in prayer to the Father of all.

To imagine that the effectiveness of the preacher is related to what he says to the listener is, as I have said, a very human mistake - we should say a very worldly one. But those that have the same worldly spirit are the ones who struggle to understand what Jesus is saying in this gospel. Jesus proposes that they need to eat His flesh and drink His blood; it is only later that He will show the apostles how this is to be done. But in order to help His listeners, He also references the history of the Israelites wandering in the desert:

This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

How are we to understand this, since we have seen our loved ones receive communion at the altar before later watching their coffins standing before the sanctuary? Is this a promise of Jesus that has not been realised? To hear these words in such a way would again be far too worldly. When Jesus speaks of the death of the Israelites in the desert after eating manna, He does not mean their physical death but their spiritual death. Manna and quail fed their bodies, but they did not feed their souls. They nourished their bellies but not their hearts. And this too is crucial.

The grace of Christ, whether in the Eucharist or in any of the sacraments, or wherever it is encountered in the spiritual life, does not only elevate but heals. Its purpose is to cure us of the poison of sin. At the same time, in the gospel the symbol of feasting, of eating and drinking, is for those who are already on the journey of the Christian life or for those who have reached the end. The journey begins with death and resurrection. If a man collapses and has no heartbeat, the last thing he needs is a square meal. He probably needs defibrillation; he may need adrenaline. It wouldn't be kindness to heat up a tin of soup and pour it down his throat in the hope of bringing some warmth back into his increasingly blueish cheeks. It wouldn’t be Jesus’ way to preach to the man the peacefulness of a heart that never beats. Peace be to you, says the Risen Christ, but He says it with the smile of a conquer who came not to bring peace but the sword, who came to destroy the empire of sin.  

Jesus preached the Eucharist and shocked a religion horrified at the idea of consuming blood. To us He preaches the cross and we are horrified at the idea of abandoning our own desires. In both cases, Jesus alone remains the antidote to a poison that simply cannot be ignored.   

I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified, says St Paul to the Corinthians. For only the crucified Lord heals us of sin, and only the crucified Lord becomes the bread of life.

For as we know, all other breads will perish.

The parable of the perishing bread

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

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Today's gospel (John 6: 22-29) unfolds for us a further scene from the sixth chapter of the gospel of Saint John. The 5,000 have been fed, Jesus has walked upon the lake, and now He is pursued by a crowd who commandeer a fleet of boats to carry them across the sea of Galilee. Finding Jesus on the other side, they question Him, but rather than satisfying their curiosity, Jesus questions their motives in pursuing Him. Finally, comes one last exchange:

What must we do, to be doing the works of God? they ask Him.

This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent, the Lord replies.

 

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Yesterday, I asked my children: what is more dangerous: hostility to religion or fake religion? With prescience beyond their years, they all answered unanimously: fake religion. A fact is greater than the Lord Mayor, as one old adage goes. But so too is a lie. When the Lord Mayor gets the facts wrong, he will simply look a fool. When the Lord Mayor has lies told against him, he has been delivered into the hands of his enemies. And if we're looking for an example of fake religion, we need only look at this first paragraph of today's gospel.

The first thing that strikes the reader is how extraordinarily careful the crowd have been in their observations. They noticed that there had only been one boat and that Jesus had not entered it with his disciples. Weighing up their observations, they themselves climb into boats and cross the lake to Capernaum. One can imagine some of these people wrung their hands long and hard about this mission. Perhaps they even organised committees to discuss the feasibility of crossing the lake on the boats and working parties to hire vessels and organise passenger lists. Others may have been keen to ensure that the best people got the best boats, as is befitting, and, of course, that the boats departed in the right order so that the right kind of people could arrive first to speak to Jesus. The first group must have believed Jesus would commend them for their industry: what did Jesus say on the mount: something about blessed are the trip planners, wasn’t it? The second group probably thought that Jesus would commend them for their right sense of things: blessed are the makers of order - surely.

And this is why, when they questioned Jesus upon their arrival, they must have been shocked to hear Jesus’ dismissal of their self-acclaimed sincerity:

Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Since all these would-be followers have venal minds, perhaps they thought Jesus was referring to the feeding of the 5,000. And so He was, but not only to that. For His rebuke continues:

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.

Now, man does not live by bread alone. Steal a man's loaf and he might go hungry. Steal a man's self-esteem, trespass on his sensibilities, or confront his unconscious needs and you might earn yourself an enemy, even a vicious one. Perhaps it would have helped here if Jesus had given us the parable of the bread that perishes. Let us imagine it for Him:

A woman baked two loaves of bread. One was wrapped in a cloth and placed in a cupboard and the other sat on the side where she was preparing a meal. Now, this woman was called away suddenly by a family tragedy and left her village for a few days. When she came back, the two loaves had spoiled: the one wrapped up in the cupboard still looked like bread but had turned as hard as stone, while the one that was left on the side had gone a lurid bluey-green and was growing little whiskers of mould.

And, having told this parable, Jesus might have asked His listeners:

Which one of these two loaves should the woman eat?

One of them still has the form of bread. Indeed, it looks like a perfect loaf. But it is dry and desiccated, unyielding to the touch, it's crustiness turned into a procrustean shell. It is ready for fossilisation and certainly could not provide any nourishing life.

If we turn now to the bread with bluey-green mould, it does not look as attractive as the wrapped loaf, but nobody could deny that there is life there: life in all its lurid colours, growth even, and with a faint, comforting smell. The sight of the first loaf would fill a baker with pride, at least until he laid his hand on its unforgiving surface. The sight of the second loaf would make a hungry man salivate and fill his gut until he felt the inevitable nausea the bread produces. But is there a single reader or listener of this blog that would not go hungry faced with these two loaves?

Here is why we cannot live on fake religion. In the end, it becomes inedible.

Jesus of course can turn both these loaves into the bread of life. Stale bread can be doused in water and heated in an oven to recover its freshness. Mouldy bread will yield its most offensive parts to a sharp knife and be only a little the worse for it. Let those who read or listen understand.

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But, the bread cannot save itself. In the final scene from the gospel extract read today, the people who have been admonished for their fake following of the Lord finally ask the honest question we noted above:

What must we do, to be doing the works of God?

And Jesus’ answer is worth a world of thought:

This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent, the Lord replies.

The Lord who promises judgement on those who mistreat the least of His little ones here places the emphasis not on works but on a supernatural faith in Him and in His mission. In other words, our first work is to recognise and confess the work of God, to glorify His action and its sufficiency, and not our own.

We are now so accustomed to making excuses for unbelief, surrounded as we are by its poisonous presence, that this passage should bring us up short. Could it be that we too are guilty of unbelief of a kind? The people who landed on the shore and received this rebuke from Jesus had gone to extraordinary trouble and perhaps even expense. And yet, it was not enough. Jesus wasn't interested in their service. There was literally nothing they could do for Him to advance the Kingdom because their hearts were still set on the kingdom of this world and all its works, pomps, and perishing bread.

Some bring to Jesus their finery and mistake it for faith. Some bring to Jesus their labour and mistake it for love. The lies they tell themselves are greater than all their finery and labour combined.

This is the work of God, Jesus tells them, that you believe in Him whom He has sent. Thereafter can all the bread that perishes be recovered and saved for the service of the Lord.

 

 

Gathering up the fragments that remain

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

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Today’s gospel (John 6: 1-15) is one of those miracles that has not an individual focus but a collective one, and which applies less to the individual and more to the Church itself. Jesus crosses the sea of Galilee where He is followed by a large crowd and repairs to a mountain side. A crucial detail appears here: it is close to the Passover feast. So, we know that while the miracle to come concerns food, it does not concern food purely for the purposes of nourishment. For the Passover is a meal that is not a meal; the Passover is a sacrifice for sin which protects the Jews from punishment, even as they memorialise their hasty departure from slavery by taking their lamb’s supper standing. Jesus questions Philip about how they could feed the people, well knowing what He planned to do. And then begins the wondrous miracle: not the miracle of making people share what they had, although we cannot exclude this from the events of that day, but the miracle of feeding 5,000 people from only five barley loaves and two fish. Only the Son of God can perform such a wonder: to feed such a huge crowd and even provide enough for leftovers. And then comes this strange denouement: the people wish to take Jesus and make him king, but Jesus withdraws again to the mountain by Himself. There are so many layers to this story that it is almost overwhelming. The lessons we can draw from it apply to God, to the Church, and to our existence in this material world.

To God first of all. For what Jesus does here is to work a miracle which recalls the feeding of the people of Israel after their departure from Egypt. Then, the people are fed with quail and manna; not manna alone which is a bread of heaven, but manna and quail - the flesh of the quail a symbol of the reality that the manna itself symbolises. Indeed, the manna and the quail taken together are themselves a type of the way in which God would feed His people in the new covenant. Giving the blind their sight and making the lame walk evoke memories of the prophets of the Old Testament. Feeding a crowd numbering in their thousands not only rivals the actions of Moses but engages with Israel’s very own sense of itself. Whoever fed the Jews like this but God alone?

If we take this miracle on another level, we find in it now not only a realisation of the type anticipated by the feeding of the Israelites in the desert but also a foreshadowing of the feeding of Jesus’ disciples down the ages. All the gospels recount this miracle, but St Mark tells us that the men sat down specifically in groups. In other words, they did not sit down randomly as individuals. Amongst this vast crowd, there was a kind of subsidiarity; it was not a case of individuals versus the collective, but of persons who could sit down with a sense of togetherness on a human scale. It is as if eating in a vast crowd is like eating alone, but eating in a group helps work that other miracle of togetherness and unity. As Saint Augustine says, the bread is made from many grains of wheat that are crushed and bound together, and the wine comes from many grapes that are likewise crushed and mingled together. The Eucharist is not only a sign of the real presence of Jesus, but of the effects that this real presence brings about in the members of the Church, now bound to Him and to each other. The fish here evokes the same relationship to bread as the quail did for the manna. This bread is not truly bread but flesh as Jesus will explain later in this chapter of the gospel of John.

While we mention Jesus’ explanation of the Eucharist, it is worthwhile noting the dramatic commentary that this later teaching gives on what is the symbol of unity. Unity is sometimes treated as some mystical or magical effect. But having shown this extraordinary sign of the sacrament of unity to come in the feeding of the 5,000, what does Jesus do? He expounds His doctrine to His listeners to the point where many of them walk away from Him. They cannot take it. He shows them the path of unity, and they break themselves upon its rock. This idea of eating His flesh is too strange. Let us go further and put this scene in our own day: what would our contemporaries have said if they heard this teaching? We can quite imagine. This Eucharistic doctrine is a like some weird cannibalism. It is primitive and backward looking. Indeed, how lacking in inclusivity it is, given that those who are gluten free will have to go without it. And what about the vegetarians? How can Jesus be so rigid? How can He be so materialistic? But above all, why does Jesus refuse to find a common path forward? Why does Jesus not accompany those who walk away? What happened to the Good Shepherd who goes in search of His sheep? In reality, all unity is bound indissolubly to truth and goodness. And when truth and goodness are rejected, it is not the work of God to compromise truth and goodness – to accommodate it to something less than itself - in the rebuilding of that unity. Of course the Good Shepherd will go in search of the lost sheep, but: Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.

And finally, we come to the lessons of this miracle for our lives in the material world. For like the miracle where Jesus made mud and put it on the blind man's eyes or used his spittle as He touched the mouth of a dumb man, so this miracle mobilises the stuff of this world to provide a channel for the grace of God. This action evokes a truth that is wholly denied today and which concerns the material limits of human living. For centuries, individualism has taught us that we alone define the moral limits of our actions. More recently, our culture now formats us in such a way that every reality, no matter how wayward or perverse, is available to us if we choose it. We have become like fallen angels, surpassing the heavy material carcasses that we call bodies, falling into a kind of psychological illness that divorces us from material ourselves. We have lost our senses, to use the title of one book by Amadeo Cencini. We have disappeared into abstractions through our communication technologies. Our friends have become bytes of data and popularity has become a matter of social media influence. We no longer buy things but services. We have deskilled ourselves, and very often can only dream of the accomplishments that others now perform on television shows.

What is all this got to do with the feeding of the 5,000? Only that this miracle is an invitation to reconnect with the logic of the gospel which requires incarnation: that spiritual lives and spiritual practices not remain merely abstract and fanciful but themselves take flesh and gather us together. This is a logic that centuries of Christian piety understood instinctively, as millions of impoverished worshippers gave their last coins to build the glorious shrines of Christendom, like Mary pouring expensive oil on the feet of Jesus.

And here now is the call for us: to take the impoverished fragments of our attention and our hearts and come together to offer them to the Lord in a humble, common prayer: O Mary, teach us always to say yes and thank you to the Lord every moment of our lives.