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.