Making straight the path within us

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

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Today’s gospel is both beguiling and brutal. John preached against Herod’s marriage to Herodias for she had previously been married to his brother Philip. To placate Herodias, Herod locked John away but punished him no further, knowing him to be a good and holy man. Herodias was not so tolerant, however, and when Herod offered Salome, her daughter, as much as half the kingdom to reward her dancing before him and his guests, Herodias told Salome ask for the head of John the Baptist from whose mouth came forth the condemnation of Herodias’s preferred lifestyle choices. Checkmate, one might say, against John and Herod. A guard wandered down the many dark steps to John’s dungeon, removed the offending item, and they served it on a dish.

The drama of this gospel is played out between four people, three of whom hardly know themselves. But let us focus here on Herod and his self-styled wife, and leave Salome for another time. Herod was a pleasure seeker, an epicure. But his tastes were complex and refined. This explains why he was happy to have a religious preacher in his house where Herod could savour his elevated thoughts and dabble – no more than dabble - with the drama of his own salvation. It was said in a previous blog post that Herod was a religious poser, a man who enjoyed the distinction of religiosity, even if he neglected its demands. How very modern of him! Perhaps he thought of himself as a normal Jew, not one of these rabid radicals who tortured themselves with thoughts of self-reform. But for all his palaces and pleasures, there was a gulf that loomed beneath Herod, and if we wish proof of that, we only need consider Jesus’ appearance before Herod during His passion when, St Luke tells us, He answered Herod nothing. There is little that can be said to help even a well-meaning narcissist whose readiness to embrace self-knowledge – if they are so ready – would be limited to the necessities of managing their self-promotion. And yet, is there not a little of Herod in each of us, wishing to have our cake and eat it, lusting for the excitement of religious engagement while leaving our unpleasant and unacknowledged wounds gently to suppurate in the background? How much baggage are we bringing with us on our journey of following Christ? That is the question. There is no room for our favourite indulgence or our preferred hostilities, or for our half-hearted accommodations. Gently, we must let God break in and steal our hearts. 

Ultimately, Herod appears not to have known what he really wanted, other than to have his cake and eat it; to sprinkle a soupcon of religiosity on his debauchee’s divan. Herodias, on the other hand, knew exactly what she wanted, or at least she thought she did. She wanted the silence of the wretched Baptist. She had paid a high price to be with her lover Herod; and here was this thunderous voice coming from the desert, denouncing her choices, and spoiling the party. Herodias’s actions were driven by hate, but what was it she hated exactly? The Baptist? Possibly. The damage to her reputation? Conceivably. Or was it the thorn in her conscience, driven in by John’s incessant admonitions? What did Herodias want if not peace in her sins? And here she was, surrounded by the opulent possessions of one of the richest men in the region, unable to savour the peace that pursuing her desires was meant to bring her. We can be sure that adding murder to her ledger only brought further burdens to her feverish mind.

And then, there is John. Today, experts in the most fashionable kinds of pastoral theology might fail John the Baptist in his final examination, citing his inability to accompany Herod and Herodias along their primrose path... It is important to remember, however, that John's actions were not simply shaped by the culture and the time. They were driven by the gravity of the sins that Herod and Herodias were guilty of. John preached repentance, not accommodation; John called for self-reform, not self-fulfilment; John ignored the superficial scratches of dissatisfied desire and went right to the gaping wound caused by rejection of God. We must not break the bruised reed, nor stifle the smouldering flax, but neither must we coddle chaos. We need the prudence of love, but we must not confuse its requirements with avoiding the consequences of what we are: the friends of a God who asks us to take up our cross and follow Him to the end. John followed Him. John lost his head and, in doing so found his life.

Today’s gospel is a parable of the chaos of the human soul when it flees from the one thing necessary, the one thing that will bring it peace. Human indifference to this one thing is not an indication of its irrelevance, but proof of our insensibility to the wound of man’s divorce from God. And the return to God, the return to our Father’s house? John made the road straight for us in that regard. We have only to remember that we are not fit to untie the sandal of the one who brings us healing, and to decrease as He increases His kingdom within us.

Healing after crisis

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

Today’s gospel (Matthew 23:13-22) sees Jesus deliver one of his tongue lashings to the Pharisees. Woe to them for avoiding heaven and blocking other people entering therein. Woe to them for turning hearts of flesh into monstrosities. Woe to them for their minute wrangling over minor laws which disgraces the sources of holiness. Although we do not hear them all in this passage, Jesus delivers seven woes or curses upon the Pharisees; not a counterbalance to the seven beatitudes, so much as seven warnings for those who will not bear His yoke.

What are we to make of such behaviour on the part of Jesus? The psychologists are already lining up with their clip board to pathologize this apparently wild conduct, determined that nothing is more all-seeing than the scientific eye. But God searches the hearts and minds of humanity to their very depths in ways no psychologist will ever understand. He knows our wounds, and He knows also how we have wounded others. The next time Jesus spoke with severity of this kind in the gospel of Matthew was precisely in the scene where He foretold the Last Judgement:

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

What strict accounts must be given and what shaking there will be when the judge is to come, says the hymn the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass. Nobody set it to music better than Mozart.

We wish to displace these accusations of Jesus. Perhaps we are sure they are not aimed at us but only and specifically and exclusively at the Pharisees. Yet in another way, their target is not only the Pharisees but all abusers of religion. It has lately been fashionable to assume the Pharisaism condemned by Jesus is embodied by those who prefer formality in liturgy, but that critique is just a spiritual version of reverse snobbery. Pharisaism in its essence is the use of religion to assert power over others; it is the instrumentalization of religion for purposes other than the glory of God; it is the parody of zeal and devotion. And this sort of power can be asserted not only with the hard-edged sharpness of the Pharisees, but also with the soft-shoe shuffle of the religious poser. Herod Antipas was a poser of this kind, with his fondness for John the Baptist’s preaching, combined with his resolute neglect of the unpalatable moral reform that John called him too. The religious poser thinks John is a Pharisee for being so harsh.

But in the heart of the Pharisees, as in the heart of us all, there are wounded exiles in need of redemption. Perhaps the difference between the Pharisees and us (if we are not ourselves Pharisees) is how we manage those wounded exiles. Do the Pharisees load up burdens on the backs of others precisely so they can avoid facing those burdens in themselves? Do they obsess about the intricacies of spiritual minutiae only so they can distract themselves from the bigger, plainer but more demanding impositions of the gospel? Jesus denounced in them especially their tortured reasoning that acted as a curtain to veil their eyes from the great simplicity of the laws of God. Granted, laws are sometimes not simple, and that is why we need experts in the law. But minutiae that acknowledge higher laws only by rendering them null represent burdens that have gone beyond the pale. It is important here to see that Jesus was not hostile to the keeping of the law which He came to fulfil. He was zealous for its proper understanding; for lower laws to cede to higher laws, as God orders them to do.

Not all the Pharisees were such vipers of hypocrisy of course. In those not moved by the levels of hypocrisy Jesus denounced, perhaps what drove them onto the rocks of legal wrangling was the fear that arises when the highest sources of the law have failed to penetrate to the depths of the human heart. We need laws; we need guidelines. But when they are not understood with the right spirit of charity and equity, then we lose the clarity, compassion and calm that result from the love of God and spirit of justice living in our very bones. Jesus came to recover humanity and to save it from sin, not to deform it in the process. Indeed, to use those oft quoted words of St Irenaeus of Lyon, the glory of God is man fully alive. What is usually not quoted is the origin of those words that are found in his masterpiece Adversus Haereses – Against the Heresies­. And the Pharisees were, in a sense, heretics, not theologically but because their obsessiveness practically deformed the image of God in man, skewering the potential of the simple souls who trusted them. How many faithful Jews were broken by the hypocrisy of these men who lashed their neighbours’ consciences into a crisis of moral and psychological inflammation, like an OCD sufferer who develops a bleach addiction and teaches it to others?

Such wounds on skin or on consciences can only be healed by the most powerful balms and, in the case of consciences, by the gentleness coming from the heart of our Saviour. We sometimes all give way to inner Pharisees who torture others. Maybe there is an inner Pharisee who tortures parts of our own soul. We should not return blow for blow, if this is the case; we can only throw ourselves again and again upon the great healer who came to save us. For those He condemns on the Last Day as Judge are only those who failed in life to seek His loving hand and the healing that He offers, His light eternal, and His eternal rest.

The impossible dream

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 1:26-38) recounts the mystery of the Annunciation which is, as it were, the mystery central to our charism in COLW. The Angel Gabriel came to Mary, greeting her with those words that are ever fresh: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Mary is startled and troubled and inquires what this might mean. Gabriel explains to her that she will conceive a son and that He will be the saviour long-awaited by the people of Israel. Mary, hearing in these words the vocation God was calling her to from all eternity, offered her consent: let it be done to me according to your word.

In this gospel scene, Mary models for us three qualities that are intrinsic to our following of Christ. Perhaps surprisingly, the first of these is not a virtue but a state of mind: it is her objectivity. Our attachments are so deep, our wounds are so serious, that objectivity escapes us very often, but not so Mary. Mary, says St Luke, was greatly troubled and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. Her mind was not warped by gentle delusions about herself; her perceptions did not pass through a cloud of neediness. Her response, therefore, was not to say: well, where have you been, I’ve been waiting? Rather, it was to test the spirits, as St Paul says. Mary models for us the anti-enthusiast’s response to religious phenomena. It is not disbelief; rather, it is prudence. This response reflects equally her humility – for who would speak to a peasant girl in Nazareth in this way, she could fairly wonder – but we shall return to that further on.

Upon hearing Gabriel’s explanation, Mary models for us a second quality in this gospel scene with the following words: How will this be, since I am a virgin? What we hear in this response is no longer merely her objectivity but now her teachability. What she has heard is extraordinary. She, the lowliest of Nazareth’s denizens, is called to be involved in the realisation of the great hope of Israel. There is no doubt she understood both sides of this mystery: the fulfilment of the promise of God, and its startlingly humble and ordinary path. Teach me, Lord, is what her words mean here. Show me, Lord, your ways, for they are not ours. God’s plan for the saving of the human race would pass none of the stress tests the cynical human mind can put it under. But then, God could make the very stones sing if He so desires. He does not need high performance; just our consent. He does not need our achievements; He asks us only to return to our origins and become once more the clay in His hands. Here is Mary, then, mothering not only His Son to life, but in her example, showing His Son’s brothers and sisters how to follow Him. Be teachable. Ask God not why me? but how will this be?

And, finally, having heard how this will be, Mary promptly answers the call with humility. Gabriel’s final words – nothing will be impossible with God­, spoken in reference to Elizabeth’s conceiving John the Baptist - are in fact the response to every query about the vocations we are all offered. Nothing is impossible with God. God, who makes manna in the desert and turns shepherds into kings, will now walk the earth to turn the stones of our hearts into the voices of his children. Let is be done to me according to your word, says Mary; fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, in the Latin of St Jerome. Fiat mihi: be it done to me.

When we say yes to the Lord, we often seem to be saying yes to the Him only in the moment. But what we miss is that every moment on earth gathers around the eternal moment of God who wills us to join Him in due course in that eternal moment of His joy. To say yes then calls forth also our thank you, calls forth our joy; and joy itself, St Thomas Aquinas teaches us, is only one of the qualities of love, along with peace and mercy. At the same time, these human yeses that join His yes to us, echo also down the centuries, through all the hearts who ever, if only for a moment, turned to God, from the lowest sinner to the highest saint.

Mary’s yes began this chorus of restoration in objectivity, teachability, and in humility. We only need follow her example to see the impossible.    

 

In search of healing

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 16-22) relates the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus to ask what he must do for eternal life. Keep the commandments, is Jesus’ fundamental message. In hearing this, the young man is on comfortable ground for he is a faithful Jew. Well, says Jesus, in that case: sell everything you have, give money to the poor, and follow me. Now, the man finds himself on uncomfortable ground. He goes away sorrowful, says the gospel, for he had great possessions.  

It would be easy to read this gospel today only from a moralist or a spiritual point of view. This young man is not a bad person; his case is very different from the woman taken in adultery or the repentant thief on the cross. He is a faithful Jew, a man of decency, and honour. What is his problem, therefore, if not that he refuses to take that leap towards the next level that Jesus calls him too: detaching himself from the things of this world? Beyond the commandments lie the evangelical counsels – poverty, chastity, and obedience –the following of which leaves the soul freer in its return to God, less encumbered by this material world. The counsels are perfected in the vows our sisters make, through which every action becomes not only an act of morality but an act of religion, offered as an instance of worship to honour the Blessed Trinity.

But the rich young man’s world is not open to this adventure. He is too attached to the things of this world. What he needs is more detachment, we could conclude. And, we may be right, in a purely material if real sense. Detachment is certainly in play in this case. Today’s gospel extract at Mass pulls the punch that the following verses of the gospel of Matthew deliver with no apology:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”

But let us look at this young man again and ask a different question. If we would like to bring him nearer to detachment – if we would ourselves wish to be more detached – what question should we ask next? What about: where does this lack of detachment come from?

After all, the man is not an evident debauchee. We cannot know his circumstances; his status as a ‘rich young man’ is all the gospel records. But people cling to the things of this world for different reasons. For some, it is about the pleasure, the sheer enjoyment that things can bring. For others, it may be something more negative: the unstated awareness of what the loss of things would mean for them. We may or may not be happy to deny ourselves the need for food for a time; as a pious young Jew, no doubt our rich young man was accustomed to that practice. But how happy are we to forego or to fast from security, from our secret clinging to the sense of safety that our many possessions provide for us? Now, perhaps this man’s lack of detachment begins to look a little different. We do not know specifically why he is sorrowful, but we may wonder whether the real problem was not giving up material possessions so much as giving up the safety and security that these things deliver without our even realising it.

Yet, we may go a little further: can this young man be helped? Is he always doomed to be in this condition? Does he just need to take himself in hand and try harder, or is there something that needs the gentle cure of divine love, driving out the toxins that our lack of love induces, and healing the wounds and sores that he could hardly allow himself to acknowledge? To help him, we would need to understand what lies beyond his general, widely shared need for security that all human beings feel to some extent. Had he known great poverty as a child? Had he lost his parents but inherited a fortune? When he saw the poverty of those who lived in the streets near his house, did his stomach turn like a man on a cliff who has no head for heights? What was the wound that lay beneath the finery and security of his rich and comfortable life? Here then is the truth. We may add coin upon coin, day by day, to our pile of accumulated gold, but none of it can bring a cure for wounds that lie so deep they need to be protected by building mental castles in the air, imaginary dwellings where we can proclaim ourselves faithful observers of the commandments, and from where we can follow after the Rabbi, asking Him questions to show how pious we are.

So, why was this rich young man sorrowful? Beneath his spiritual limitations, what wounds stood in need of healing? If only he had stayed around, he might have found not only the healing he needed, but also some consolation in the last words Jesus speaks in this chapter of Matthew:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.

It is not enough to follow the commandments. Our whole being stands in need of healing. And we must  not turn away but knock at the door and wait for the answer of the Divine Doctor. 

Mary, bringer of joy

One from the Blog Archives. An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link. Happy feast day to all!

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 39-56) tells us more about the Blessed Mother than almost any other part of Sacred Scripture. Bethlehem means in Hebrew ‘House of Bread’, but before Bethlehem, Mary was the House of that Bread who had come down from heaven following the Annunciation, Mary’s original joy. He is present in this gospel in mysterious and perfectly Eucharistic silence. Mary’s journey to the hill country of Judah in today’s gospel is, as it were, the first Eucharistic procession in history, and like the coming of the Eucharist, Mary’s arrival brings joy to Elizabeth and to John.

To Elizabeth first – for like her child, she too was filled in this moment with the Holy Spirit. Some Christians appear to think of Mary as a baby machine for the incarnation, but not Elizabeth who recognises Mary’s blessing for what it is: the greatest dignity ever accorded any human being. Mary’s holiness is crowned by her union and cooperation with God (Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it), but her dignity and holiness are rooted in her divine motherhood, for her preservation from sin was a gift that made possible her vocation. Hence, Elizabeth’s question: why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? When the Litany of Loretto calls Mary cause of our joy, it is evoking this very moment of encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, and proposing it as the sign for our encounter with Mary, our mother and our model. If Mary is not the cause of our joy, we have to question whether we have really understood what she brings, for she brings this joy not just to Elizabeth but to succeeding generations also…

Beginning with John of course, Jesus’ cousin - who would be known as John the Baptist, and who would lay down his life in defence of the sanctity of marriage, the social symbol of the union of Jesus with His Church. Any woman who has carried a child could tells us what it is like to be booted in the guts by an unborn infant, but the commentators of the gospel have long seen this as the moment in which John was himself filled with the Holy Spirit, like his mother Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the wife of a priest, speaks from the depths of the Old Testament, like Esther, Ruth, or perhaps more like Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel. Samuel's joy, like Mary’s, was to say: Here I am Lord: your servant is listening – for obedience comes from the Latin obedire which is to listen or pay attention. But the obedient John speaks here also, in the only way an unborn child can speak, and in speaking thus, articulates the then silent cry of all those future generations who would call Mary blessed later on.   

 And then in the hearing of both Elizabeth and John, Mary’s hymn of joy unfolds, singing the greatness of God, His condescension to her, her future glory, God’s mastery of human affairs and history, and His faithfulness to those He promised mercy and forgiveness. For Mary knew a kind of forgiveness or at least salvation, not for personal or original sin but in a preventative sense, for she too needed a redeemer whose merits would reach back to her own conception and exclude her from the effects of the fall of Man.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth thereafter. May she stay with every one of us, bring us joy today, and travel with us, no longer towards the hills of the earthly Judah, but on our journey in this life towards the eternal hills.

O Mary, teach us always to say ‘yes’ to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our lives.

Amen.   

The family business

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19:27-29) recounts a brief exchange between Jesus, Peter, and the other apostles. We who have left everything: what do we get? is St Peter’s rather desperate question, which has the tone of a man who has let his enthusiasm get ahead of his mastery of the terms and conditions of a contract. Jesus’ reply, however, is generous beyond expectations. The apostles, He says, will judge the tribes of Israel, receive a hundredfold in this life, and inherit eternal life.

We must not think any the less of Peter for this question. In this chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus had just stood the disciples’ sensibilities on their heads by saying how hard it would be for the wealthy to be saved. We must place the exchange in today’s gospel in this specific context: how can we make sense of things when Jesus has challenged the very way in which we understand things? In the Old Testament, material blessings were often associated with God’s blessings. There is a hangover of this notion in the prosperity gospel and certain versions of the doctrine of predestination. If material benefits are the sign of God’s blessings, what does it mean to be poor and homeless, like the Son of Man, especially for us who are such earth-bound creatures of flesh, blood, and bone?

In this sense, today’s gospel thrills with the implications of incarnation, of the taking of flesh by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity who enters history and, in so doing, begins to carve out from the rocks of the passing ages a pathway back to the Father for His lost children. There is a paradox behind the incarnation. Our hearts are made for thee, O God, and are restless until they rest in thee, says St Augustine. Nevertheless, the way in which we must ascend to such a place of rest is proportioned to our weakness by our loving God who made us such as we are, material creatures. We are not meant to be angels. Indeed, those who would aspire to be angels often end up as beasts, as the old saying goes.

Had we not fallen, there would be no dilemma here, but since we are fallen, we encounter the dilemma throughout our lives: on the one hand, we must deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Jesus, and, on the other, this path of denial is not an abandonment of what we are as material creatures. God made matter; it is not the work of the devil. There is in other words a theology not only of the body but of the material world, and of our fleshly hearts that need evangelisation like our weary souls, and here we can speak of incarnation in a broader sense: the way in which the grace of the incarnation of the Son of God takes flesh in our human reality of spirit and matter. This incarnation in a secondary sense involves a certain physicality, made concrete in the matter of the seven sacraments, but it also evokes the following of Christ, the being like Him who is the icon of the children of God, and in whose image we are remade. May everyone we meet encounter in us the Word made flesh in Mary, as we so often pray, not as a mere historical accident but as a condition of our discipleship.

Of course, in COLW the words of the gospel today – in which Jesus alludes to those who have left brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children or lands for His sake - are met in their truest and fullest sense in the lives of our sisters. Nevertheless, there is another sense in which they may be true for the rest of us, and in which we again encounter the dilemma I spoke of above.

For on the one hand, we need brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, and lands to live in. These features of our existence are not mere social arrangements or physical conditions of our lives, nor indeed do they only impose on us a series of duties that we ought to perform; more than all these things, their roots plunge down into our very identities, they shape where we have come from and how we receive the world around us. Our relationship with our fathers and mothers in the natural order will shape our ability to encompass fatherhood and motherhood in a spiritual sense.

But on the other hand, Jesus’ invitation to leave fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, etc asks us not so much to abandon these relationships as to transform their reality through His love. It asks us more particularly not to break our bonds harshly but to put our loves – love of God and love of family - into a right order. What is important here is that even those of us who do not physically leave our families behind, as do our sisters, are still called to bring our closest relationships into harmony with the following of Christ. Our families too have the same call, though they may not recognise it.

We find in this perhaps some clue as to the generosity of Jesus’ reward to his disciples. Loving God and loving our families in God may cost us things that run right to the roots of who we are. There is a fear in Peter’s original question, a fear that might lurk in all our minds when we face the radical nature of this call to love that we all are given. In this sense, we might listen again to today’s gospel and hear in it an echo of those tender words found in the gospel of Luke: Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.

Vocation and beauty

 An audio version of today's gospel and blog (memorial of St Dominic) can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 57-62) relates Jesus’ answers to those who say they will follow Him, and to one whom He asks to follow Him. Answering the former, He speaks directly to their hesitation, for each says, I will follow you… and yet there is a “but”, spoken or unspoken, within their offers. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head, Jesus tells the first. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God, He says to another. And to the one who hesitates when Jesus Himself calls him, Jesus speaks in the starkest terms: Let the dead bury their dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God – quite a thing to say to a man who seemingly had just lost a parent.

As ever, we can easily imagine that the stories of these three would-be disciples were more complex than the gospel allows us to see. Each had walked his own path until that point; each was known intimately to Jesus, the Saviour. As for the first, we can easily imagine this lad loved his comforts, and perhaps imagined he could have his cake (whatever that was) and eat it. But neither he nor we can do so, not at least if we are intent on the following of Christ. If anyone would follow me, let him deny himself… Deny himself, not because Christianity is masochistic, but because the conundrum of our fallen race is that we always carry the seeds of our own destruction in our back pocket. We are our own worst enemies. When Chesterton asked the question: “What’s wrong with the world?” he answered it himself wryly: “I am.” So, whence come our satisfactions? Where do we wish to lay our heads? If we wish to lay them anywhere but on the breast of the Sacred Heart, then we might hear these words for ourselves also: the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Then, Jesus turned from the first volunteer to another potential disciple, issuing to him a joyous command: Follow me. Would that every one of us might hear such words from the Lord in the sense in which He intends them for us in our own lives. Follow me, be like me, model yourself on me, Jesus says. In response, would that we might make our own those words of Jesus’ other apostle Paul: to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. When the man asked first to go and bury his father, the bystanders might have raised an eyebrow at Jesus’ savage observation: Let the dead bury their dead. Was the man not observing the Fourth Commandment? How could the Rabbi urge him not to do so? As we have already said, there is something else going on here in for this individual, and the gospel does not reveal it to us. We can only speculate. Perhaps it was not true, and Jesus knew it. After all, what Jewish son in mourning was likely to be found wandering the highways, following a crowd, and listening to a popular preacher. Let us be realistic here and observe that Let the dead bury their dead might in fact have been a kinder response to the man’s excuse than Liar, liar pants on fire. Not everyone who expresses an apparently pious wish is as intent on piety as they would like to appear. The desire expressed before the world – the desire we express before ourselves - is not necessarily the reality.

We find the same holds true for the third person also. He only wanted to go home and say goodbye before heading off to the hills with Jesus, didn’t he? Don’t go off with strangers and tell someone where you are going are fairly sound principles of prudent conduct. And yet, here again, Jesus saw through the superficial piety, and wiped its gaudy makeup off the man’s face for him. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Why did this man speak up and offer to follow Jesus? Why did the first man do likewise? We can only speculate on their attempts at heroism. Maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe they thought it was the impressive thing to do. Maybe they were taken by enthusiasm. Maybe they were jealous of the closeness of the apostles to the Lord. Maybe they imagined there was some other advantage to be had. But, in reality, Jesus was not content with their surface-level offers. Jesus knows the human heart and reads it like a book.

While none of us is intrinsically bad, we are all intrinsically complex, whereas the calling that the Lord gives all of us is, for the most part, radically simple: follow me. It is not too hard or too challenging for us: it is simply too simple for us. The closer we are to God, the simpler we become, the less we are a laminated mess of conflicting desires, complicated by strands of acquired behaviour, heavy gloss coats of bad habit, and suppurating scabs on wounds unhealed, sometimes by our own neglect.

 Jesus’ apparently brutal responses to these generous offers of would-be followers were not hyperbolic; they were medicinal. They were mirrors into which the would-be followers could gaze … if they dared. For sometimes the Lord teaches us by inviting us to gaze upon His own beautiful face, and sometimes He teaches us by making us confront the ugliness of our own, made uglier still by every lie we tell ourselves. For it is only on this journey that our own beautify – the beauty to which He calls us and not the kind that we grab for – can be rediscovered and restored.

The compassion of the heart of our God

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 9:35-10:1) sees Jesus going about Israel and proclaiming the good news. He heals those who are sick and reconciles those lost in their sins. Having given this example, His heart is filled with compassion for those He ministers to, and He says to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few. And then having called His disciples and given them authority, He sends them out to do as He has done.  

Last Friday, the gospel inspired us to reflect on the anti-vocation culture of Nazareth where the paths people were expected to take were those built by social pressure and wayward hearts. In today's gospel, we find instead a kind of antidote to this poisonous perception. On one level, this gospel is especially about the priestly vocation, the vocation to be a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and to gather in the harvest in due season. These duties of the priesthood are paralleled by a wider collective duty imposed on all of us, and that we reflect on all too little, to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. If we lament our lack of priests or the sadly ageing priesthood, we should also lament our failure to hear and obey this command of the Lord to beg for this extraordinary blessing of priestly vocations.

In one sense, of course, all vocations are extraordinary. What a thing it is, what a beautiful thing it is, for the Lord to call our name and to say to us: Follow me.

If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

At the root of our personal vocations and the paths we take in our lives is this wider command, the universal call to holiness, to be conformed to the image of Christ, as adopted children of the Father so that He finds in us the image of His son.

And yet the priestly vocation, epitomised entirely by the saint whose memorial we honour today, Saint John Vianney, includes that conformity to Christ which encompasses His own relationship with the Mystical Body.  For only Christ as priest, as head of the Mystical Body, ministers to that body, gives to it the spousal gifts of the seven Sacraments, and so helps it become day by day His worthy spouse. This is why the priesthood cannot be reduced to a mere social function, to be seized on and instrumentalised by any individual, whether because they are socially privileged, or because of some ambient gender equality that is blind to the mystery that it represents. Every individual can reflect Christ in some way; this is the universal call to holiness. But just as in the Sacrament of the Eucharist only the foodstuffs of bread and wine can be turned into the body and blood of Christ for our spiritual nourishment, so in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, only a man can be made the icon of Christ's relationship with His spouse, the Church.

And in some mysterious way, the relationship is reciprocal. The priest who has left home and family and brothers and sisters and wealth can, if he lives the mystery of his priesthood in the spirit of Christ, discover that he is repaid a hundredfold in this life. For just as we have a duty to pray for more labourers to be sent into the harvest, we have a duty to care for the labourers who are already there, men who are both privileged and afflicted by a calling which, according to my late parish priest Fr Tony – for whose soul I ask you to pray – requires of them all to be crucified before the end.

In answer to the many betrayals by priests who have become abusers, we have often heard tell of the serious difficulties of the priesthood. These should not be underestimated, of course. But no vocation can be understood and grasped only by its difficulties. Every vocation has its difficulties. The spirit of a culture of vocation is found rather in the beauty and the truth of every vocation. Perhaps, if we were to understand the beauty of our own vocations, we would live them with greater fidelity. For we love our grumbles and groans. But how much more have we cause to find in the blessed calling, which each and every one of us has been given, a glimpse – just a small glimpse – of the beauty of our loving God who pours out His heart for every one of us, even to the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His earthly life.

Every vocation then includes a calling to understand His compassion, His willingness to look upon the crowds who are harassed and helpless, fixing upon them the gaze of a Shepherd who wishes to gather the sheep to Himself.

Vocation, not self-promotion

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 54-58) recounts an episode in which Jesus visits Nazareth and finds the population sceptical about His ministry. Where did this man get his wisdom and these mighty works? they wonder. Their questions come thick and fast, and before long the mood grows dark: They took offence at him. Jesus’ response to this precipitous judgement was philosophical but also practical. A prophet is not without honour except in his home town, He concluded, and He performed few miracles for them, the gospel says, because of their unbelief.

Sometimes, human beings are sunk simply by their own shortcomings. Here is Nazareth, the neediest of Israel’s villages, well known as a place of dishonour. And yet, instead of celebrating their local celebrity, the people were filled with scepticism at Jesus’ works. Was it not right to ask questions? Of course, it was. Was it not a normal requirement to discern well in such circumstances? Without a doubt. So, why did the Nazarenes go so wrong in the process?

The clue might be found in this gospel’s subtext, what lies beneath the surface. Where did this man get his wisdom? only appears to be a fair inquiry. Yet behind it is a kind of jealous attack. It is not Jesus’ wisdom that they were inquiring about. They were reacting instead to the very fact of it, like neighbours who react and say: have you seen what the Jones’s have done now? After that first question, therefore, every other inquiry was an attempt to demean the Messiah in their midst: Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? Yet again, we must read the subtext, the thing that lies beneath the surface: these questions were rhetorical, not genuinely interrogative. They were not about what they were about. They did not seek information. Rather, they sought to make the point that whatever Jesus had done, He was simply a local boy and didn’t deserve the acclaim. And there is the wayward human heart in a nutshell, souring like milk in the warm summer sun.

Jesus cannot heal us until we have fully recognised how broken we are, but we cannot fully recognise how broken we are when we are jealously comparing ourselves to others. The crowd’s questions almost amount to asking: why should we not be just as renowned as Jesus? Jealousy manifests itself in different ways; in the impious, it is simple, raw, and aggressive, as it is in this scene. In the pious, it might show itself through flattery or imitation or in an ill-disguised competitiveness for heavenly glory. But both categories of people are moved by the same force from within, the same instinct to want to show that they are as good as the one they are jealous of, or at least that those they are jealous of are no better than them. Perhaps it is because they do not know their own worth for only those who neglect their worth in God’s eyes look upon the qualities of others as a measure of their own failings.

But what is the measure of who we are, of what we are to become, and indeed of what we are worth? Are these things not determined by our vocation: our personal vocation, calling us to be our very own reflection of the goodness and beauty of our divine Creator, and our life’s vocation, calling us to some particular path of living? Instead of finding our guide in these two realities, we often allow who we are and what we are worth to be shaped by so many other forces in the human game of inauthenticity: by social pressures – the kind that the crowd try to exert in this gospel – or by covetous pursuit when we run towards not what God calls us to be but towards the thing that most seems attractive to us: wealth, fame, influence. Instead of vocation, we seem to aspire to self-promotion. But the truth is that we are least ourselves when we most wish to seem and to grab.

Nazareth of Our Lord’s day is the anti-culture of vocation: it is not interested in hearing God’s call, nor in honouring God’s call in others. To dwell spiritually in the Nazareth of England in the living holy house of the heart, proposes another way.