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.