Finding the measure of all things

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 28-33) sees Jesus setting a series of teachings before his Apostles. He speaks to their fears, telling them not to be concerned for the destruction of their earthly goods – material possessions or social status – but rather to be ready to pursue God and eternity over and above everything else. On this will our judgement finally depend.

What is the fundamental issue at stake underpinning this gospel extract? Quite simply, it is a matter of what we derive our values from, the values which guide our actions and our relations with God and with others. Depending on what we value, our decisions and our conduct will be as distinct as east and west. The values that have ruled our conduct in this life will be the stuff of our judgement before the Father in eternity, Jesus tells us.

We see here instantly the sense of Jesus’ first warning: Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. By the body, Jesus does not only mean our physical selves but rather everything that we have and are in this material world. We are indeed material creatures, and we are heavily conditioned by the things that form our culture and our environment. We are gentrified or rendered savage by the civilizations into which we are born. And because of our sinful wounds, we internalise lessons that surround us - the doctrines of consumerism or the indulgences of sexual licence -instead of doing what our baptism calls us to: sitting at the feet of Christ every new dawn in order to learn His gospel afresh. Perhaps we pat ourselves on the back for not being so overtly greedy as some Wall Street banker, but there are many material realities that we probably cling to unconsciously, separation from which would put us to a trial that only grace could save us from. And so again the Lord warns us: do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. It is not that Jesus expects us to make a bonfire of the material things or advantages that we have, but rather that the follower of Christ should bring these things also into the obedience of His Kingdom where the soul is safe and where, please God, the body will join it after resurrection.

And since these things must come into the obedience of His Kingdom, it stands to reason that Jesus requires us to bring our social relations and standing into the same obedience. We cannot love God and Mammon, but by the same token, as St Teresa of Avila warns us, perhaps we cannot really begin to serve the Lord until we have lost our reputation. The sin of our first parents had both a material and a social dimension. They were meant not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but when they sinned, it was not firstly because of a physical or material need. Eve, we know, listened to the serpent, and chose thereby to make herself a child of the Father of Lies rather than a child of our Heavenly Father. She entered into relation with the agent of deceit, separating herself from the author of truth. Man is the social animal, said the pagan philosopher Aristotle, but in Eve’s case we see that these social relations also exist with the world of the spirit. In this sense, perhaps Adam’s case is closer to our own for when he sinned, he said it was because of another human being: The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ We now call that kind of thing “throwing somebody under the bus.” Adam is undone in this moment through taking the law of his heart no longer from his Creator but from this creature of flesh and blood before him. Just at the moment he was called to acknowledge the law of his Father in heaven, his actions bespoke a denial of that law in the society of his spouse You shall have no other gods before me, says the first commandment, yet when we commit any sin, there is always some element of our action that places something or someone – the strangest of gods – before the Lord.  

How then are we not to be dragged to destruction either by the things we possess and enjoy or by the social whirl in which we move? The answer to this dilemma lies in the middle of this gospel extract:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father knowing. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; You are of more value than many sparrows.

The law of God that should rule our relations with the material world and indeed with all our fellow human creatures finds a foundation in us through the virtue of faith and the gift of understanding. On the one hand, the virtue of faith assures us of everything that God has revealed about Himself, His promises, and our path back to our home, because He has said it and His word is true, as the act of Faith tells us. This faith, as Saint Paul tells the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And then there is the gift of knowledge which only the Holy Spirit can move in us. This is the gift which enables us to penetrate the surface reality of things in order to perceive reality in the light of God. This is the gift which enables us to see behind the ephemeral and passing life of the birds of the air – or indeed the ephemeral and passing life of the mighty human forces that surround us – to catch a glimpse instead of the loving, guiding hand of divine Providence. How those of us who who must live in the world at large – the world of material possessions and ambitions with all its paper-thin guarantees of bliss and social status - should beg the Holy Spirit every day to illumine us in this way; to let us see the mighty parade of human folly for what it is: the result of wayward zeal and misguided love.

‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’ So speaks our Saviour to calm our fears that we will not survive the losses that discipleship calls us to.

The light shines in the darkness

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 16-18) is all about light: what light we stand in, and what we do with the light. The light is clearly the light of God, the light of eternity. Yet we can be tempted into hiding the light of God in our hearts, our betrayal of which we may not even notice until the little of it we retain is taken away. So says Jesus in this compact passage. How can we avoid such a calamity?

In its origins, the light that Jesus here commands us to let shine is not our light but His light in us. Normally, for light to shine out we need to open up the shutters or draw wide the curtains. Paradoxically, like a flame that needs protection as it takes hold, the only way God’s light can shine out of us is for it first to shine inwardly in the cell of our soul. We dilute the light every time we leave this cell and seek the artificial light down the corridors of our gaudy imaginations. In contrast, the light that comes from other kinds of knowledge is good – the light of philosophy or science or a healthy imagination -  but only God’s light can flood our hearts like a summer daybreak to reveal His supernatural mysteries through faith and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Why then do we hide the light, covering it with a bowl or putting it beneath a bed, to use Jesus’ images? We are right to be prudent of course: Jesus said let your light shine, but He did not say we ought to shine it into others’ eyes like an interrogator!

Perhaps we sometimes refuse to share the light for two reasons: first, we consider ‘letting our light shine’ as a technical problem of communication, of saying the right thing at the right time and in just the right way, as if we were the builders of God’s kingdom, not Him. And nevertheless, this is in various ways a miscalculation, not because discretion is wrong – far from it – but because being the light to others cannot be reduced to a technique. We are not called to communication but to communion, as the great French writer Fabrice Hadjadj says. God’s call, which should echo in our lives for the sake of others, is not merely a lesson to be learned but a romantic adventure to be engaged upon. Blessed be God if we become skilled in reaching out, but the fruitfulness of our actions depends on their remaining rooted in the vine that is Christ. The harvest comes from His hand, not ours. As to whether we are speaking in the right moment, for that we must depend explicitly and confidently on the Holy Spirit.

The second reason we might refuse to let our light shine comes from a much worse place in which our hesitancy arises now from a kind of surrender to the light of others, their views and attitudes, their mistaken opinions, as if a rightful humility before their experience should lead us into hesitancy about our own. If we miscalculate here, the problem runs deep, for hesitancy is not the fruit of humility but a sign that our grip on the light of God is weak, possibly that His flame burns only feebly in our souls, or perhaps that we have not taken the time to put fuel on the blaze He intends to kindle in our hearts. For fire to take hold, it needs oxygen, heat, and fuel. For God’s fire to take hold, it needs the breath of the Holy Spirit, the heat of God’s love, and the fuel of our surrender to God’s light, in the rays of which the light of others is like a 40 watt light bulb before the blazing sun.

The fact we do have not His boldness suggests we have not yet gone deeply enough into His mystery. Or worse, that instead of turning to Him in the cell of our souls, we wander down the labyrinth of our own minds, vainly seeking out our reflection in the mirror of the minds of others, rather than in the mind of God. To God’s light, we can strangely, not to say perversely, prefer the chiaroscuro – the blend of dark and light - that we see in pictures like Caravaggio’s study of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist. Behold Salome who dreamed of triumph, now disgusted by the realisation of her mother's fantasy.

This is why to anyone who has not, even the little he thinks he has will be taken away. This is not a punishment on poverty. Rather, it is the fate of those who, through a kind of greed, have become excessively attached to the things humans can cling to beyond reason – esteem, respect, status, good standing, reputation, the good opinion of our fellows. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it.

If, instead, we were rich in the contemplation of that light that shines within us, if we let it fill our minds and hearts in daily prayer, then we would not even think or care to dissimulate about what is within, least of all to hide it under bowl or bed. We would no more think of doing so than we would think of turning on the light in a room that is already flooded with the rays of the sun. The journey towards allowing the light to shine out of us begins with the step that takes us towards the light coming from the mystery of His presence in our hearts, for the kingdom of God is within. 

The family likeness

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 8-12) is taken from the options for the feast of St Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 669-690. In it, we hear Jesus in hyperbolic mood. We must call nobody teacher, we must call nobody father, He says, for God the Father above is the only true teacher and the only true father. Jesus gives us these commands in the same way he tells us to cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes if they lead us into sin. It is a matter of hyperbole that seeks to make a wider, deeper, and more substantial point: do not idolise other humans but attend to the Lord.

In His final remarks, however, Jesus passes from hyperbole to paradox:

The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Behold a paradoxical teaching more often honoured in the breach than in the observance. It challenges us in the same way that Jesus’ teaching on death and resurrection challenges: unless the seed of grain falling to the ground dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it springs forth with new life. And perhaps our disastrous failure to observe Jesus’ teaching about humility and the dangers of self-exaltation is measured by the two vast mysteries that it encompasses.

The first of these mysteries concerns the human heart and its own self-knowledge. No matter who we are, not only are we strangers to each other, we are often strangers to ourselves. It is precisely the one who has poor knowledge of himself that is prone to self-exaltation. And yet, it is not such an easy mistake to avoid. On the one hand, even after Baptism, our souls retain the wounds of original sin; we suffer from the pride of life, as St John says. Our minds are sometimes like a hall of mirrors that make us appear in our mind’s eye as more important, more accomplished, more deserving than we are in reality. To cite words I have often used on this blog, pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said.

But if this human frailty is one reason we do not know ourselves well, our personal woundedness is another. We are not merely the person we were when we were born; we are also the sum not only of our experiences, but also of how we have dealt with those experiences. Too often, our hearts have been wounded afresh – wounded deep down where our emotions and fundamental perceptions entwine with our moral choices – and our inner psyche lives with painful memories that compromise our journey, and leave us pointed inwards on ourselves. It is as if, after the wounds of original sin, we suffer a secondary infection that is personal to ourselves. Why indeed then do we exalt ourselves? If at one level it is sheer common or garden human vanity, at another it might be some kind of unconscious compensation, the ready-made herbal salve of self-delusion supposedly to protect us from further hurt. But our medicine is useless, a case of human quackery pretending to solve the waywardness of sin.

The antidote – the only way we can lay hold of this mystery of our broken selves - comes actually from humbling ourselves before the Lord. We must sit in our abjectness alongside blind Bartimaeus, and simply beg for the mercy of the passing Saviour. Humbling ourselves here means not only confessing the distorted nature of our sinful self-love, but also avoiding the dangerous temptation to self-hatred or abasement, for this too is a kind of compensation, a form of self-harm that attempts to force the attention of others:

It is easier than we think to hate ourselves. Grace means forgetting ourselves, as the priest writes in his journal towards the end of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest.

And through a humble recognition of ourselves, of our own complexity, our inner wounds and poverty, we are brought to the edge of the second mystery I alluded to above: the mysterious action of God in our own lives. For the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

The term exalt is derived from the Latin altus meaning on high. For God to exalt us means for Him to bring us to the heights, i.e. close to Himself. For He that is mighty has done great things to me, as Mary our model observes. And yet, He does great things in each of us who are willing to be His disciples. Here, the paradoxes of Jesus’ initial teaching deepen further still, for to bring us on high, the Lord God must go deep within us to bring us – we who are often exiled from the truth about ourselves - into the very cell and centre of our souls, there to encounter the Lord who dwells within through grace.

When, in COLW, we speak of others encountering in us the Word made flesh in Mary, we evoke in many ways the path which Jesus Himself has followed in order to live among us. This is our family likeness. For He too humbled himself to take on flesh only to be exalted upon the Cross of our Redemption. Our spiritual likeness to Mary is likewise made apparent, for it was in great part her utter humility that enabled her to play the role of the Mother of the Saviour. What, after all, distinguished her from our first parents if not her readiness to humbly obey the Lord, knowing the truth of who she was in relation to God, rather than identifying with her own delusions like they had done?

This then, as I say, is the family likeness that runs on both sides of the family of God. If Jesus who is God put off His own glory and took the form of a servant to seek the lost sheep, if Mary bore the gaze of the Almighty in her lowliness and so became the place where the Word took flesh in history, so we who would be His followers must put off our deluded glory, in order to be brought to those heights that only His wisdom knows. 

The two other commandments

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

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Today’s brief gospel (John 19: 25-27) shares with us one of the shortest and most touching scenes in the life of Jesus. The cross stands on Calvary bearing the dying Saviour, and those faithful to Him stand beside it. In one moment, Jesus both confides His disciples to Mary, and His Mother to His disciples. St John assumes this command not only spiritually but in the temporal sense and looks after Mary for the rest of her time on earth.

The two great commandments are to love God and to love one’s neighbour. These have been the bedrock of God’s relationship to His people since the time of the Old Testament. Now, since the Son of God has taken flesh and lived as a man, and as the people of Israel becomes the family of God through the New Testament, new relationships are formed, a new intimacy with God is brought about, and we find that Jesus’ masterpiece of grace, His immaculately conceived Mother, is made central to His relationship with those He has chosen. And this new relationship, this new intimacy, is lived out through two further commandments, one to the Blessed Mother and one to Jesus’ followers.

To Mary, first, then He says: Woman, behold your son. Woman here is a form of address directly translated from the Hebrew but missing its honorific value in European languages. Then: Behold your son; there is the command. Mary does not cherish us maternally only because she is good hearted; she does so in obedience to Her Son’s command, for she is always the obedient one. We speak so much of the active dimension of her maternity – of what we wish her to do for us – that we almost never reflect on her simply becoming our Mother, casting a maternal gaze of love upon her offspring, as she must do to fulfil the command: behold your son. Unlike with her First Born, she has brought us forth in the pain of spiritual labour, breaking her waters in a flood of tears on Calvary. And, nevertheless, she must hold us as her children, despite the fact our own actions required such sacrifice and pain of her First Born and indeed of herself. The gaze of Mary is not the soppy, cupid-lipped goggling of a thousand mushy pious cards; it comes through a blur of tears and red-rimmed eyes, with the faintest smile playing about her lips showing already the joy that stands on the other side of this present hour of sorrow. Not even our most terrible sins make her look away, for to do so, she would have to break Jesus’ command: behold your son.

Then, in this gospel, we hear a second command: Son, behold your mother. This cannot just be a wry remark; tortured unbearably and unremittingly in crucifixion, Jesus is beyond the irony of some of His earlier remarks. And, like all his earlier remarks, there is a spiritual significance in these words that opens up profound mysteries at our feet without our even realising. Jesus goes to the Father, but He does not leave us comfortless. His Spirit He will send, but Christians have long since known the comfort He intended us to take in this one figure, the spouse of His Holy Spirit, who shines ever brighter still in our spiritual landscape. Behold your mother who knows my heart, He might have said. Behold your mother, who taught me human virtues to complement the divine perfections of my heart. Behold your mother who knows best of all how to think thoughts of peace with God since her own peace with God has never been lost.

Jesus’ teachings are sometimes of challenging complexity, but some are as limpid as crystal clear water. Love one another as I have loved you, is one of these. Behold your mother, is another one. Behold your mother, for in COLW Mary is our model in everything that concerns the following of Christ. If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too, says the Lord, and who was ever more there with the Lord than the Blessed Mother?

In the end, that is because He chose her before the foundation of the world, and she responded with her ever-constant yes. To behold our Mother, to imitate her, as all little children imitate their mothers – imitate them in the most fundamental human ways while they are babes in arms, returning smile for smile before they have even stirred from their cradle – we only need give echo to her yes and add to it our thank you.

Seeing and believing

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 6:39-42) presents us with Jesus’ teachings on the connection between purity of intention and clear moral vision. The blind cannot lead the blind. It is a teaching which comes into even greater focus when applied to the criticism of others and when, Jesus tells us, we are in even greater danger of hypocrisy. First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

In this conclusion, not only does Jesus tell us what we must do – i.e. wash our own laundry before criticising others for not washing theirs - but He also reminds us how our perceptions of the faults of others are often distorted. Yet the problem of hypocrisy and the challenge of reforming ourselves before trying to reform others only arise from the difficulty that Jesus pinpoints at the outset: can the blind lead the blind? Yet, what does He mean in this?

The scholastics used to say: every comparison limps except in the point of comparison. What blind people lack in vision, they often compensate for by some other extraordinary facility or other. Still, Jesus’ comparison here is apt. By saying the blind cannot lead the blind, what He means is that those who lack moral and spiritual insight cannot effectively enable others to see morally and spiritually. Very few people intentionally blind themselves; but when it comes to a loss of moral vision, we face three difficulties.

The first is that a certain moral blindness is one of the wounds of original sin; to be blind is to be human in a sense. We are born this way!

The second is that we rarely know all the facts around another’s case and need to be wary of prejudging their situation. Going after the log in our brother’s eye is interference but it is almost always an error of judgement to begin with.

The third difficulty is that our own moral failings create, as it were, our own moral and spiritual cataracts of various hues and colours across our vision. Our minds turn rose tinted, perhaps dark and sombre, or even a jaundiced yellow. We fall into folly through thoughtlessness, or perhaps into pessimism through a lack of hope. God forbid we lapse at times into cynicism which is to know the price of things without weighing their value. All of these denote in themselves barriers that we unwittingly erect to the fruitfulness the Holy Spirit wants to bring forth in us.

How different we are then from those visionaries Elizabeth and Mary who appear not in this gospel extract but in the extract chosen for today’s feast of the Holy Name of Mary. Where we fumble in our pride, they perceive God’s ways in humility; while we unconsciously revel in our mistaken superiority, they let go and let God, waiting for His light in patience, rather than rushing to simulate their own.

To try to pick out the speck in our brother’s eye before removing the log from our own is, from a COLW perspective, to place mission before contemplation; it is to favour activity over reflection, or to deny to the apostolate the benefits of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. After all, if we knew ourselves like Elizabeth and Mary did, we would not appoint missions to ourselves, but wait in joyful hope for the beginning and end of all mission, the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Only in that school can we learn assuredly the lessons Dom Chataurd share with the Church a hundred years ago: that contemplation is the soul of the apostolate, that faith is the condition of knowing God and coming to the truth about ourselves, and that overreaching activism and frenetic doings should be recognised for the blindness that they are.

Our place among the ranks of the unknown

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 1-16 and 18-23) recounts the genealogy of Jesus, going back to David and eventually to Abraham. A whole procession of names, most of them unknown to us, pass us by, as we await the coming of the Saviour. At last, the gospel relates some of the circumstances around Mary’s pregnancy, St Joseph’s prophetic dream reassuring him about the child, and the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah that ‘the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.'

What spiritual sense can we make of this passage which seems so alien to us? What was its meaning to the first Christian readers? The final section about the situation of Mary and Joseph in a way speaks much more to us, with its mixture of trial and relief, and the assurance of prophecy fulfilled. Surely, we can afford to leave the first section alone or just skim over it? But then, what if we did not?

There are recognisable names of course in the genealogy: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Zadok among them.  But here we find some beginning of a deeper mystery. Each of these men were individuals in themselves with stories and experiences of their own, private thoughts and feelings locked away in their own hearts, not listed in a genealogy. Yet, in another sense, they serve to point the way forward to Christ, the Saviour to come, the hope of every human breast that longs and longs and does not know why. Abraham and Isaac between them played out the drama of the persons of the Father and the Son, Abraham willing to countenance the sacrifice of his child, Isaac bearing the weight of the wood on his shoulders. Jacob’s struggles anticipated those of Jesus, as does his vision of the bridge between heaven and earth which is realised in his Divine descendent. David and Zadok between them speak to us of Jesus’ kingship and His priesthood, his passionate love of God poured out in the song of His heart, and His utter devotion to the adoration of God. Jesus does not merely appear, therefore, at the end of this genealogy; rather, He is present throughout it, His actions foreshadowed in those of his ancestors.

Arguably, however, this is not the only way that Jesus’ genealogy may speak to us. Jesus is God and man; His destiny was to bestride the world as its conqueror and live among us as our brother. And so, we can regard every one of these other names, especially the unknown ones, as types not of Jesus but of us, the anawim the very ordinary ones, the ones that are seen and forgotten, the ones who go unnoticed by the busy and important world. They lived in hope and so must we; they lived often in ignorance of God’s purposes, and so do we. They did not know when their waiting would end, and neither do we. They were probably perturbed by the many troubles of the children of God, and so are we, scandalised in our leaders, disappointed in those we trust, wearied by others and wearied by ourselves. Yet all we can do at times is to cling on to Jesus, our alpha and omega. Like them, therefore, we are participants in that grand tradition described by St Paul in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews:

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings… By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God… By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. … By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going… And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.

What is this except the tradition of faith, the faith that goes before us and comes after us, that we have received and that by God’s grace we must be committed to passing on, for there are, as Chesterton put it, no private suns and moons, i.e. there is no account of the universe that is simply for little me. We belong to a larger world. The Sun of Justice is the Son of the Father, and He will rule forever over His Father’s domain.

This grand genealogy means something to us for two reasons: first, because it tells us about Jesus, and second, because it tells us about ourselves. It tells us about Jesus whose coming, ministry and destiny are foretold in the major figures whose names we have dwelt on already. It tells us about ourselves in the unknown names, the litany of the little ones forgotten or ignored by the world but who play a role in the passing on of that life which bears fruit in ways that are incalculable. Every hair on our heads is numbered, as we know, and the Father holds us in the palm of His hand and shapes us with the skill of a potter, if only we will allow it; if only we will suffer ourselves to be remade in the image of His Son.

And how they must have greeted their descendent when He opened for them the gates of their prison between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when a new light dawned upon their ignorance, and mercy and justice together breathed the possibility of life back into the moribund figure of broken humanity. This is our family tree, the fruit of divine promises and many hidden and unknown human fidelities, handed on down the ages, from father to son and mother to daughter, until the last syllable of recorded time.

 The genealogy of Jesus, so strange upon our ear, is, then, no excursion into mere curiosity or arcane trivia. It is the unfolding and making known of the tale of God’s mercies down the centuries, told out in the lives of the many most of whose names are known to God alone.

Hard drinking and deep inner work

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 5: 33-39) relates to us a typical exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. It begins by the Pharisees thinking they are asking difficult questions about the shoddy religious operation run by Jesus. He brushes off their “concerns” about the apostles by saying that the latter will indeed fast one day … when the bridegroom is gone. While this mysterious reference left the Pharisees wondering why on earth He was claiming to be the bridegroom of the Song of Songs, Jesus bamboozled them further still by a well developed metaphor about new and old wine and new and old wineskins. And in their puzzlement, no doubt the tension of the moment was diffused. But what are we to make of it?

We might say that the bamboozling metaphor of the second part of this abstract is a direct rebuke to the error of the Pharisees in the first. What is their error, apart from having hearts that were largely closed to their Divine Saviour? Simply that they were all too often tricked by appearances. They could not see beyond them. Religiosity seemed to lie for them in the outward imitation of exterior habits and conforming these to the intricacies of religious observance. They never seemed to go deeper, except in trying to entrap Jesus in His words. Jesus refers to them in the end as hypocrites, which is as much as to say that they were conscious of the superficiality of their religion and were beyond caring about it.

God forbid that any one of us should be guilty of such hypocrisy, and yet we too have to resist the temptation of an exterior rehearsal of religiosity which is only skin deep. As Dickens’s Dr Jobbling in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit observes, man is an imitative biped. We learn by imitation; we acquire most of our social skills through unconsciously observing and copying our elders. We fit into new social situations in the same manner, even as adults. We are instinctively chameleons; we have a herd instinct. Yet these autonomic responses to being social animals are both a boon and a curse, especially when it comes to religion. They leave us exposed to fads and fashions, as much as to good example. If we do not think carefully, we can easily internalise the superficiality of others, and multiply it by our own. Something more is asked of us if we are to do what Jesus commands us in the gospel: to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Him.

And, we might observe, this last message is what lies beneath the metaphor of the wine and the wineskins in the second part of the gospel extract today. The new wine is that of the Holy Spirit, poured out afresh and in abundance in our baptism, in all the sacraments of the Church, and through the many inspirations of our day. The new wine is ours to be drunk on all we like, provided we do not forget the duty to weep in due season! Let’s become hard drinkers! Our fiat in joy is the spousal fiat to the bridegroom of our souls whose presence with the apostles set so different a tone from the pieties of all the Pharisees combined.

But what then are the new wineskins if not ourselves? The grace poured into our hearts is the new wine of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, but while grace heals as well as sanctifying us, it must be received truly, authentically, and interiorly; it must not simply be poured over us as if we were competitors spraying champagne on a winners’ podium. For us in COLW, this means there is deep inner work to do.

This is the work that challenges us on the inside to find the paths down, down, down to the very interior cell of our souls where we meet both our true self and the Divine Guest who dwells in us through grace. We are not who we project to the world; we are not the fine figure or the loathed creature in our imagination’s unreliable eye. We are what we are before God, and as St Catherine of Sienna discovered, that means we are those who are not, just as He is who is. Here is the renewal of our wineskins, their transformation from their old self-congratulatory or self-loathing leatheriness to a new responsive suppleness, attuned more to the aromas and inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

More particularly, it is only as we allow this transformation inside us to happen - only insofar as we walk the walk of self-knowledge, not talk the talk of pious conformism – that our wineskins can receive the sweet liquor of grace without tainting it with our own bitter acidity.

If we seek an answer to why pious people can be sometimes so off putting – why we fail to bear fruit or truly smack of Christ to others - we might find it here in this metaphor: our wineskins are old. We have failed to do the deep inner work, and are tainting the wine, almost until it is vinegar.

Jesus ends with the wry reflection that after drinking old wine, nobody wants the new. He does not approve this reaction. He is simply telling us how easy it is to be comfortable in our religion at a superficial level without ever descending to the core of who we are to meet Him.

Who will deliver me from the body of this death? Only Jesus Christ, the steward of the new wine and the master of the new wineskins.  

Sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, healing to the wounded heart

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 4: 16-30) relates the visit of Jesus to his own town of Nazareth. He reads in the synagogue and preaches on a text of Isaiah. Having at first amazed them, He then upsets the people with His commentary, and becoming enraged they turn into a lynch mob and set out to hurl Him off a local cliff, only to find that He has slipped their grasp and escaped. The level of detail in the synagogue scene is remarkable, evidently an eye-witness account. Was the Blessed Mother there or one of His disciples?

When the same gospel occurred last year, this blog reflected on the reaction of the people. They were prevented from hearing the vocation that Jesus offered them because a fantasy about their own destiny stood in their way and made them deaf. This time around, let us ask instead why they reacted so angrily that they were ready to commit murder.

Why do pious people become sometimes so angry in the name of their faith? There is indeed a form of just anger when it is in accord with right reason, but the people’s anger in this scene is not of that kind. If we had asked the Nazarenes why they were angry, they would no doubt have answered that Jesus’ implication about the privileges of the Gentiles was a calculated insult to the chosen people of God. What else could He have meant, they might ask, when all He emphasised were the unbelievers whom Adonai in His mercy had sent Elijah and Elisha to help? Those of a more theological bent might have added that this insult really sat atop a heresy that threatened the meaning of the very covenant of God with His people. Jesus in this light would be a preacher of error, a liar, and a threat to the faith of the town. The Law forbade such blasphemy; better to punish Jesus now and rid Israel of His lies before He did any further damage. Such might have been their justification, had they been called on to justify their attempted assault on Him.

All that of course would have been wrong headed for several reasons. Jesus was not delivering a calculated insult; they should have known Him much better than that, and indeed they did. Still, there are none so blind as those ready to take offence. Moreover, on a theological level the position of the Jewish people in the Old Covenant was not as exclusive as the Nazarenes’ reaction seemed to suggest; many moments in the Old Testament indicate God’s plan to broaden His reconciliation with the world beyond the confines of Israel, from the figures of Melchizedek and Ruth the Moabite to the faith of Naaman and Jethro. So, if Jesus was not being malicious, and if His views were hardly heretical, what was the cause of this anger in the people of His native town? How might we explain it?

God alone knows the secrets of the heart. We will perhaps learn on the day of judgement what passions and thoughts drove this extraordinarily brutal display. But if we seek some hypothesis, beyond the obvious one of offended pride, perhaps we might find it in the weakness of otherwise faithful souls when human wounds are covered up by, or intertwined with, theological or spiritual excuses. What did Jesus’ answer about Elijah and Elisha require of them? It required them to cling a little less tightly, a little less possessively, to their sense of being the Chosen People of God. But then why were they clinging so tightly to it? It is not as if this was a mistaken notion: God had indeed chosen them. But why had its importance loomed so large in their consciousness? Instantly, they would perhaps defend their feelings on theological or spiritual grounds. This is what faithful souls do, they might argue, the implication being: We do this action or that action because we are so full of faith. Charity urges us. But is this the case? To be full of faith is to be full of God, and where is the spirit of God in the angry mood of a lynch mob? Where is the justice? Where is the fair hearing?

The anger of imbeciles fills the world, as the French writer Georges Bernanos was fond of saying, but perhaps that is a little harsh. Yet Bernanos was aware, as some faithful souls are not, that while love drives our fear, fear often impedes love. What were the Nazarenes afraid of then? That again is their secret but might they have been afraid not so much of Jesus’ blasphemy, as of their own crumbling faith? Here they were, living under Roman occupation, one more offence against the self-belief of Israel to be God’s Chosen ones in a pagan world, and now here comes a miracle-working preacher, indeed one of their own kind, challenging them to think about God’s plans for that iniquitous world that was afflicting them. Jesus did not offend their faith; He triggered their fear. He did not disrespect the Covenant of God; He questioned their distortion of it, for their faith brought comfort without bringing light.

The problem here was not really the behaviour of the Nazarenes so much as what their behaviour concealed from the world, deep down in their hearts. They were shaken day in and day out in their faith; now Jesus was here to shake them some more. But why were they shaken? We have said twice - but let us say it a third time - that God keeps the secrets of the heart. But perhaps they were shaken because they had not known how to shine the light of their faith into their deepest sense of insecurity. It is not enough to hold the truths of the faith; we must hold them with the spirit of God.

Perhaps we must not blame them too much if this was the case. How brutalizing and damaging must it be to live under occupation, to be always in danger of falling foul of an invader’s injustice, and to see all this happen seemingly against the promises of the God to whom one is dedicated. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? But is this not our question also, we Christians of the twenty-first century?

The challenge for us, of course, is always to recognise that not only is the environment around us a strange land; that we can hardly miss, and Jesus explicitly did not promise to make us happy in this world. But more than that, this strange land is also found within us. It is strange because it is made up not only of light but of darkness; not only of the truths of God but also of our own false deductions, and our tortured logic; not only of the truths of faith but of the hall of mirrors created by our vanity; not only of His merciful action, but also of our own wayward attempts to save ourselves, trying to cauterise our wounded hearts when we should be offering them in humility to God’s healing touch. We cannot save ourselves after all, we who are the lowest of the low, the anawim, the widows of Sidon or the lepers of Syria.

But Jesus can lead us out of captivity, restore our sight and set us at liberty, not only from the world’s oppression but from our own.