A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 16:15-20) gives us the last scene in
the gospel of St Mark, setting out Jesus’ final command to the apostles to
preach the gospel, and promising that their work would be accompanied by
miracles and signs. Then the Lord is taken into heaven where, St Mark tells us,
He sits at the right hand of God, while the apostles went out to preach the
good news.
The launch of the Church in the wake of Pentecost was, as
someone has said, like the launch of some great rocket from Cape Canaveral, the
noise and fire of the engines like the roar of the Holy Ghost into history; the
power, the grace under pressure of the generations of martyrs to come and their
often miraculous actions like the imposing profile of technological majesty,
projecting itself into the sky in the sight of the whole world. St Mark’s
gospel is the simplest and most straightforward of the gospel narratives, and
yet it does not shy away in this final chapter from the power and immensity of the
Redeemer of the human race.
For this is the first thing to note about such powers: that
like all gifts, they are the fruit of the abundance of Christ. When Christ
walked the earth, power flowed out of Him even at His merest touch. Bonum
diffusivum est – goodness shares itself, the ancient Greek principle, was
later adopted by St Thomas and the other scholastic theologians of the Middle
Ages, but it captures something of the overflowing nature of God’s loving
kindness, of the God who makes the sun and rain to come on the evil as well as
on the good, of the God who works the miracles of history, as well as the
mysterious wonders that happen only in private.
Jesus’ charismatic gifts, however, His ability to work
miracles and do astounding feats: these are something more, especially when
they are gifted to mere mortals. Faith, hope, charity, and all the other gifts
of God are essential to our sanctification. In contrast, miracles, locutions,
visions, bilocation, or whatever extraordinary signs the apostles and other have
worked: these are not for the sanctification of the individual but for the sanctification
of others.
There is then this paradox of holy displacement according to
which the signs which are most associated with the holiness of a person are in
fact not the gifts that make them holy. This paradox is most exquisitely realised
in the life of the Virgin Mary who, apart from a touch of prophecy at the time
of the Magnificat, achieved no extraordinary signs or actions in her life. Yet later
on, there she stands, queen of apostles, and queen of martyrs, the greatest of
the witnesses of Christ, the ark of the new covenant and the new gate of
heaven. Her miracles will come of course but not until she sits in glory beside
her Son by the throne of the Almighty Father.
So important are these charismatic gifts that, except for
the category of martyr, the Church demands them as a sign from any individual
to whom the faithful wish to attribute sainthood. And yet, is it not also true
that some of the greatest saints, like Mary, follow a path of apparent
obscurity, of a profound silence, without show, without demonstrable signs of
wonder? This is surely true of the mightiest French saint of them all, St
Therese of Lisieux, the obscure Normand Carmelite who died of tuberculosis at
24 in a country rent by extreme culture wars against the Church, and who ever
since has inspired Catholics the world over and obtained so many miracles
through her intercession. In the end, all the baptised, every single one of us,
are called to become an image of Christ through whom we are adopted of the Father,
yet we do this in our distinct ways. Some may indeed work miraculous signs,
like Christ in the pomp of His ministry; others are reduced to weakness and
helplessness, like Christ in His hidden life or in the moment of His terrible
passion.
The question then is not whether we live up to the most spectacular
embodiment of Christ, but whether we are faithfully listening to, and doggedly
following, the vocation that the Lord issues to us, the path that is carved by the streams of grace in our
soul, revealing that particular beauty of the Trinity that it is our calling to reflect. Follow me, Christ
says; and wherever the Master goes, there must the disciple follow. Some will
follow Him in His glory and astound the world, making manifest the power of the
Lord; in contrast, others will follow Him as they follow the mute Lamb, the voiceless
victim of sin, the silent Man of Sorrows despised. For as Fr Manley Hopkins
wrote:
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, As
Kingfishers Catch Fire).
