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.