Casting light in our darkness

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 2-11) shows us two contrasting scenes, both of which cast a light on our faith in the coming of Christ, our Saviour. In the first scene, the disciples of John the Baptist approach Jesus and ask Him, apparently at John’s behest, whether He was the One who was to come. John did not send them for his own satisfaction; he knew full well who was to come, had been familiar with His coming since his earliest infancy, and likewise must have known the dignity of his aunt whose visits were always a blessing beyond all hope in the house of John’s parents Elizabeth and Zachariah. Rather, John sent his disciples to Jesus to learn what they needed to know in order, finally, to abandon the path of the Baptist, and follow Jesus instead. In the second scene, which immediately follows, Jesus asks the crowds, who had gone to see John previously, what it was that they saw in him – a reed shaken by the wind, or a man clothed in soft garments? The possibilities are ironic and deliberately provocative. Answering His own question, Jesus concludes by revealing John’s real identity as the prophet of the Messiah.  Jesus affirms, again with an enigmatic paradox, that John was great but not as great as the least in the kingdom of heaven.

In this complex scene, what is it that the Lord seeks to teach us? We might say it is something about the complexity of vision and the need for faith before the approaching mysteries of His coming into the world. For in the first instance, John’s disciples are invited to look at the plain evidence: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, leapers are cleansed and the deaf hear. There were an increasing number of recipients of such miracles in the days of Jesus: those who had been once afflicted and now walked free of their burdens. This was tangible evidence of who Jesus was, not least because it was a fulfilment of prophecy, for these were the very signs the prophesied Messiah was meant to produce. Jesus came to build a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, but its fruits spilt over into the material world, and the healing from sin brought with it healing from the other disorders of this life. His invitation to John’s disciples, therefore, was for them to look and see; not to ignore the obvious; not to turn their eyes from the evidence on the basis that perhaps there was another explanation for what they saw. The challenge to them was to be simple, for it is perhaps one of the sins of the devout, as John’s disciples were, to be too complex, too involved in theological wrangling and minutiae. Their tendencies were those of the learned, and they needed this lesson of simple observation to set them free.

The lesson of the Lord to the crowds, however, is quite different. For the sin of the crowd, of the generally undevout, is not to be too complicated but to be too shallow; to be so immersed in this world that they cannot see beyond the surface level; to be so unreflective that they ricochet off the atmosphere of the mysteries before them. To the casual observer, driven on by no more than sensation-seeking curiosity, perhaps John appeared as a reed shaken by the wind, a wild and insubstantial thing; a creature of the desert, a holy mad man. John’s attraction for the shallow observer could have been the attraction that all curiosities hold for the vulgar crowd. So, Jesus shakes them with His question, and then He follows home with some of His often-searing irony:

What did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft garments? Behold those who wear soft garments are in kings’ houses.  

But what is going on here if not that Jesus is now wrong-footing them, passing from one extreme to the other? Any half decent teacher should immediately spot the tactic: show the shallow ones some obviously wrong answers, and they have a chance of alighting on the right one. And then the right one comes as the fulfilment of the prophecy:

Behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.

In citing these words of Malachi, Jesus is saying that John is the prophet, and, if not yet that He Himself is the Christ, at least that the Christ is among them. The people would have to join up the dots for themselves, especially those who had heard Jesus’ reply to John’s disciples.

Today’s gospel then offers us these contrasting lessons. John’s disciples must approach the mystery of His coming through simplicity. They have vision but it needs to become focused. The crowd in contrast must approach this mystery through coming alive to faith. They have their reason and their wits, but they need to be enriched.

There are lessons for ourselves in both regards. Those who are devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient humility; perhaps they are mislead into the shallows by believing their learning will be enough, as if Divine Revelation were a communication package and not an invitation to a divine communion. Those who are not devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient faith; they barely approach the waters of the divine mysteries, believing that worldly insight will be enough, as if in this life God were another system to game, like all the others.

And, so why, in Jesus’ concluding remarks, was the least in the kingdom of heaven greater than John? Here, Jesus leaves the crowd, and John’s disciples if they were still in earshot, with a paradox that again is an invitation. There they were, awaiting the coming of the Prince of Peace who was expected to sweep away the enemies of Israel, and here was the Messiah, now revealing Himself in an unexpected mystery of divine humility. Jesus is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven simply because He makes Himself the least, the servant of all, emptying out His dignity to walk among us, to eat with us, and even to lie in the filthy surroundings of a tumbledown dwelling among animals, like the poorest of the poor. For this is how He intends to break through our complexity and our shallowness, our pride and our self-sufficiency, and to cast some light into our darkness to reveal to us the eternal depths of the love of the Father who sent Him to save us and bring us home.  

He ain't heavy

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 28-30) is an extract from a longer address of the Lord in which He berates the towns of Israel who had heard His preaching and not repented. Woe unto them, is His searing message – no sweetening of the pill from the Lord of all sweetness. And then comes this gentle coda to the chapter, a word of kindness to His little ones: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. … For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

We are unsure of how to take these words that on their surface are so inviting. Is this how it is really, Lord, we wonder? Can it be this straightforward? It seems all the harder to believe Jesus in this instance because our own experience apparently contradicts His infallible word. After all, if being a disciple were that easy, why aren’t more of us saints? Why aren’t more of us simply just competent at bearing the yoke of the Lord? We remember His other injunction of course: if any man will be my disciple, he must deny himself, take us his cross and follow me… How are we to square this with the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden? We gaze at the sky and we wonder: does it all depend on what mood He is in? How is this so, Lord?

But what we fail to see or to appreciate is that it is not Jesus’ burden that is heavy; it is not His yoke that makes things such a struggle for us; rather, it is our own. Jesus says Follow me, and along we wish to go. But the trouble with us is that we want to bring all our stuff with us, mostly unconsciously although not always. Committing to Him in our grandiloquent prayers, we unconsciously bring our self-centredness with us, our latent assumptions about who are number 1 and number 2 around here (me and Jesus of course). We make our donations to the Lord, and then, in a perverse tribute to His advice, we do not let our righthand see that our lefthand is holding back from giving what it needs to give. Our supposed all is in the end only a fraction. In other words, deep down we give half-heartedly. We want to have our cake and eat it. We love without surrender, and we sacrifice only with calculation.

And thus, we feel the cross and the burdens are heavy. We know none of the lightness that possessed the soul of Jesus, even in His desolation on the Cross. Centred on ourselves, all the forces of the sinner’s gravity weigh on our shoulders; and thus, unwittingly, we are the cause of most of our grief. Our souls bathe not in a liquor of gratitude but in a stew of when will it endism? We feel we deserve better; we have not really considered what we are owed.

Human nature does not change down the ages. It is very much as the fourth-century St Augustine put it in his prayer for Holy Communion:

 

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

 

And, Augustine himself acknowledges in the prayer our inconstancy in resolution:

 

In time of correction we confess our wrongdoing: after Thy visitation we forget that we have wept.

If Thou stretchest forth Thy hand, we promise amendment; if Thou withholdest the sword, we keep not our promise.

 

How then, we wonder, can we know the lightness of His burden and the easiness of His yoke? Here we must surrender to the divine pedagogy, to the training that He offers us every day, making - like Mary our Model - our yes and thank you to Him and in every minute of every day. Deep down, His pedagogy enacts that one great command that Jesus issued to His fisherman followers: put out into the deep. Let go and surrender. In other words, believe the gospel, embrace the path and all that it means for us as individuals … with our own wounds and attachments.

Unless we are gifted by some special grace, this is not the work of one day or one night; it is not the work of one prayer or one retreat. How could we learn of Him – the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end – in so short a time? Through this slow discipleship, the reality of our becoming Him, conformed to His image, becoming an icon of the Father to others, can be seen in all its incarnational reality.

Only slowly do we set down our own burdens, shed our false selves, and become the dream that the Father had of us from all time. Only gradually will we know just how light and easy are the burdens of Christ. And then, and only then, please God, He will give us rest.

  

Making straight the way of the Lord

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3:1-12) shows us scenes from the ministry of St John the Baptist, the one who came to make straight the way of the Lord. Like a distant prophetic figure out of the Old Testament – in a sense, the last of the Old Testament prophets who all point forward to Christ – St John, the cousin of the Lord, calls the listening Israelites to repentance, urges them to do good, and to be mindful of the eternal consequences of their actions. In the most alarming metaphors, He predicts, moreover, the figure of the Christ who will baptise the people with the Holy Spirit and fire, and winnow the good from the evil in an eternal settlement of justice. There are many ways in which such a scene and such messages could be approached. Yet one theme that strikes the reader today is what we might see as St John the Baptist’s call to reality: his call to sinners to see the reality about themselves and the reality of the stakes of this life.

Who am I and, even, why am I not that other person? Hardly anybody ask themselves these things explicitly, but they are inquiries that underlie our earliest sense of self. The waters of the self soon become muddied through our engagement with sin, and then, our waywardness, the result of the wounds of original sin, becomes compounded by our growing inability to face the truth about the mistakes we have made. As Hilaire Belloc says in one bitingly satirical poem:

If you have luck you find in early youth

How dangerous it is to tell the Truth.

Especially, we might add, the truth about ourselves. St John the Baptist addresses the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but when he calls them a brood of vipers, he is speaking to us through them. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, he advises them, as he advises us all. But the mould and blight of self-deception lies in various thicknesses upon our otherwise fruitful actions. How well do we know ourselves? Better than we think, most likely, for otherwise, we would have no instinct for covering up our deceits, if not with outright lies, then with our reverse-engineered justifications, the false trails we lay for others to still believe in us. And when we do these things, we make ourselves the children of the Father of Lies whose writhing form is sometimes depicted beneath the feet of the Virgin Mother. When Moses made a serpent of brass and hung it on the crotch of a tree to cure the Israelites of the poisonous snake bites, his action symbolised that the Christ would look like any other viper or sinner, and yet He would bring not poison but a cure. We are not so evil as to be beyond redemption; there is a cure for us. But neither are we so good as to be able to free ourselves easily from the entanglements of self-deception, from our lack of realism. We must, as St Teresa of Avila tells us, eat the bread of self-knowledge with every meal. Knowing who we are is part of the road back towards God, for it was by a category error about ourselves – wishing to be as gods – that we left the path that He had fixed for us originally.

And if St John the Baptist calls us to be realists about ourselves, he also calls us back to reality over the consequences of our actions. As we reflected on in a recent post, time rises in our hearts like the crest of a mountain on either side of which lie the eternal destinies of the good and the wicked. We enjoy with our faculty of freedom the possibility of getting home but we incur the risk of getting lost on the way. And this freedom is meant for something. St John’s metaphors depict Jesus as a farmer who winnows his harvest in search of the good grain; we belong to the divine orchard and are destined to bear fruit or to be felled. In other words, ours is a qualified freedom; we are free for something. God did not make us free to invent our own selfish worlds but to share freely in His world of unquenchable goodness. There may have been a time when Catholics were taught too brutally about these eternal risks, like children of neurotic parents taught to live in a state of constant emotional trauma. But now we have run to the other extreme where God is either an indulgent Sugar Daddy, benignly satisfied with the gift of our distracted attention, or a cool bro who would never do anything so evil as to hold us to account. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire, promises the prophet of the Lord. When did we last hear that message? We are fools if we do not reflect on it from time to time, as the Exercises of St Ignatius urge us to.

These are the means by which St John tries to make the way straight for the Lord. If our ears are to be opened to the good news to come, we need self-knowledge; we need to shed the lies with which we comfort ourselves and face our worse selves only to bring them to the healing touch of Christ. He is an orchardist on the look out for unfruitful trees, but He is also the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep. He is not in the end a farming merchant or trader but a Father, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

And, likewise, if our hearts are to accept the call that He offers us and that we wish to attend to, we must reflect often on the eternal vistas that stretch away on either side of the crest of time upon which we walk: to the right, the everlasting hills of the divine country which bathe our hearts in the light of hope, and to the left, the unfathomable lake of fire, as seen in St John the Apostle’s vision.

As the great Fulton Sheen said, reflecting on the crosses of the criminals that stood either side of the innocent Christ: Let us not presume: one thief remained unrepentant. Let us not despair; one thief stole heaven. 

From signs to silence

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).