From the Archives: Sweet conceit

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 4: 24-30) should be sobering for us.

We read in this gospel of an attempt that was made on Jesus’ life. Until the moment of His passion, this is the only event in which His life is threatened during his adulthood and in which the hands of the would-be murders are placed upon Him. But the really shocking thing is that this happens in His own hometown. And not only is His life threatened, but the townspeople lead him towards a cliff to throw Him down it. One imagines this place to be the scene of countless childhood games for the youth of the area, for children are always drawn towards danger. And now, it is set to become the place of a brutal and murderous assault.

What is most concerning here is that the people laying hands on Him are those who have known Him for the longest time. It is His neighbours and perhaps even some former friends who are suddenly filled with this violent compulsion against Christ. How skin-deep the appearances can be! Those who have known Him best have the dubious distinction of being those who have threatened Him most. Was this simply because of His identifying Himself with the prophecy of the Messiah a few verses before today's extract begins? Yet it is not that which sparks their anger but the implications He makes by saying He will work no miracles in Nazareth as He had done in Capernaum, just as the earlier prophets had been selective in their missions. He offends their sense of entitlement; He contradicts the implicit story this people tell themselves about their closeness to the Lord.

The lesson for us is simple: we should beware of shallow familiarity with Christ. Familiarity breeds contempt. Easy acquaintanceship is a trap, a counterfeit of true intimacy. We are called to something much deeper and much more alive. We are called to a friendship which would defy the madness of crowds and the bullying self-justifications of a mob who find their reassurance in the fact that everyone shares their inclinations and their outrage. What has Jesus told them that makes them so mad if not that they must not stand on their privileges?

Every one of us, and especially the most powerful, should give serious thought to the dangerous seductions that our supposedly sweet but secretly self-congratulatory intentions give way to. What defenders of the honour of the prophets must these violent neighbours of Christ believed themselves to be! How much steadier and more sensible was their view when compared to that of this young upstart Jesus! How much more respectable were they than a man who had broken every rule of good sense and respectability by tipping over the tables of money changers in the temple!

Like these Nazarenes, however, we should beware of sweet conceit. 

“Dives, when you and I go down to hell”

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 16: 19-31) is the parable of the rich man and the poor man. The rich man is given no name in the parable, but I follow here the tradition of calling him Dives which means ‘rich’ in Latin. On the surface, this is a simple story in which Jesus points to the dangers of wealth and the mercy of God on those who suffer. Yet it is also a kind of anti- ghost story for it denies the possibility of communication between the living and the dead, at least in this sense: that there are no missions of mercy that originate in hell. Lazarus, who in this life suffered constantly poverty and ill health, now finds all his cares relieved. Dives, who in this life never missed a moment of pleasure and satisfaction, finds himself in torment. There is also a sting in the tail of this parable, for the lesson that Abraham gives to Divas is a foretelling of the unbelief of the Pharisees who, like the family of Dives, will not believe even if someone comes back to them from the dead.

Our last reflection on Tuesday concerned an uncomfortable truth about this life, i.e. corrupt religious authority. Our reflection today concerns an uncomfortable truth about the next life and what used to be called one of the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. Why is Dives in hell? If we read the words of Abraham carelessly, we might imagine that his punishment and the reward of Lazarus are simply meant to balance the scales against their fates in this world. Yet this would be a misunderstanding. Dives did not go to hell because he wore fine linen in this life; Jesus wore a fine tunic that was woven in one piece. Dives did not go to hell because he ate sumptuously; so too did Jesus and in the houses of sinners. So, how do we explain their respective fates?

Lazarus was in the bosom of Abraham, the limbo of the Fathers until the coming of Christ the Liberator, for the same reason that any human being escapes the punishment due to sin: simply because he was the beneficiary of the mercy of God. The parable does not tell us enough about his interior life, but since the Author of the parable is the one who tells us that what makes a man good is what comes from his heart, Lazarus’s virtues do not consist in his having sores and being poverty stricken. Somewhere in his soul, Lazarus belonged to God, longed for God; and like Job, he turned his heart to God despite his ill fortune.

In contrast, Dives was in hell for the same reason that any human being may go there: because he chose creatures over his Creator. But what do I mean by saying he made this choice? Dives’s crimes should trouble us all, for they were not crimes of commission but of omission; not so much about the bad things he did, as about the good things he left undone, the evil that he allowed by his failure to act.

Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults

as the psalmist prays. Jesus will return to the reality of this kind of sin in His foretelling of the last judgement when He says:

insomuch as you did not do these things to the least of my brethren, you did not do them to me.

We cannot see this as a punishment for ignorance, as if God were to punish those who simply do not think. The punishment goes rather to the root of that ignorance, for Dives’s ignorance and his inaction arise from a heart that is turned in on itself. Self-indulgence is only a superficial risk for the wealthy; the greater risk is the inner wounding that comes from selfishness and covetousness, the psychological grasping for the safety that our fallen human nature attributes to our environment and possessions. Nobody speaks today about the figure of the miser who has become something of a caricature. But there is a miser who lurks in every one of us. This miser has the desire to build our safety out of the things of this world and to cling to them tightly, if unwittingly, in an absurd communion of the damned and the perishable.

But the parable of Dives and Lazarus is not a tragedy, even if Dives’s damnation is a calamity for him. In the end, like the thieves crucified either side of Jesus, Dives received his just desserts. There is no consolation for him from the mouth of Abraham, either from the spiritual torment evoked by his unbearable thirst, anticipating the physical punishments of the damned after the Resurrection of the Dead, or the moral torment of his inability to warn his family about the dangers that awaited them.

We rely on the infinite mercy of God, but it seems that this infinite mercy is not an unconditional mercy expressed in the bromides of a thousand liberal do-gooders. There is a time given to us, and then there is a time when there is no more time. There is a day in which we can act, and then the light is lost, and our account must be paid. There is a morning when we will rise for the last time, when we may draft a diary that will have no following chapter, and in which plans laid will not be fulfilled. There is an hour of our responsibility in which we will be required to give our response.

Then, on that day, as on the day of the Last Judgment, let us pray now that we are spared what we may deserve and receive the gift given to Lazarus.

Humbly, I submit …

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23:1-12) sees Jesus launch a scathing attack on the Pharisees for their hypocrisy. They must be obeyed due to their authority – they sit in Moses’ chair - but their example must be utterly shunned. Jesus lays emphasis on the fact that they burden others with duties that they themselves neglect, but especially that they seek their reward in the admiration or veneration of others. Not so should it be among Jesus’ disciples, neither overburdening each other, nor vying for the first place, but giving way to each other, ever decreasing as Christ increases in them. Resorting to hyperbole, Jesus tells His followers not to seek any honours whatsoever, for in the end only those who humble themselves will be exalted.

There are many lessons on which we could dwell in this gospel passage but let us go to an uncomfortable one today. For this gospel is a commentary on what direction our path should take in the face of corrupt religious authority. The Pharisees were the keepers of the law and readily reminded others of how they were failing in that regard. Yet their rigidity and pedantry were only a secondary fault. Their primary fault was in defacing the image of God in themselves and warping it in others, even as they feigned to serve Him. Yes, this was a matter of hypocrisy, but there are many hypocrites out there whose peccadillos are known to them alone. In the case of the Pharisees, their faults were obvious and public, and there they were, acclaiming themselves the voice of the divine while preening and congratulating themselves on looking so holy and so refined. Both saintliness and devilry proceed by imitation: either we become perfect like our heavenly Father, remembering at all times our lowly status as disciples, or we arrogate to ourselves privileges that do not belong to us, in imitation of the Father of Lies. The devil, says St Jerome, is the ape of God i.e. his insincere imitator.

Thus, corrupt religious authority, which has the appearance of godliness but departs from it in tone, manner, or substance. And let us not indulge in the fantasy that its presence is limited to a few books of Scripture and the remote and misty depths of history. The story of the Church is uncomfortably filled with the ranks of Pharisees in every generation, betraying their duty to reflect the image of God to others, from the traitor who was first appointed within the ranks of the apostles, to those who turned the church of Corinth into a chaotic community; from Pope Alexander VI who hosted notorious orgies to Pope Leo X whose excesses finally stirred Luther’s temper to breaking point; and more recently, from clergy who have destroyed the innocence of the little ones by a depravity that is itself a profound mockery of sexuality, to the religious superiors who wreck subordinates with their destructive models of leadership and the burdens of their own inner wounds. Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, a play which is all about the abuse of authority, found the right formula for such individuals:

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

Incidentally, Pharisees would not prosper were it not for a band of individuals who stand, as it were, between them and the people, who flatly refuse to accept that the Pharisees are corrupt or wrong, either out of wayward respect, or out of wayward charity, or out of an unregulated sense of their own need for safety. Yet they too become in their turn Pharisees, or at least pale imitators of the holy and humble restraint that filled St Catherine of Sienna, even as she warned Pope Gregory XI. Prophets speak truth to power, and we are all baptised priests, prophets, and kings.

Yet this passage in the gospel today also offers a lifeline to every Pharisee and to those who look on in horror at their actions.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

How often has it been said, by saint after saint, that the true foundation of the spiritual life is humility? Humility, the virtue by which we recognise that we are hummus of the earth:

Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.

But hummus is not a poor soil; it is a dark, rich, nutrient dense material, made of decomposing plant and animal matter. In that sense, it is a surprisingly apt metaphor for us, for our self-knowledge is like the breakdown of all that happens to us, all that we experience, as we ruminate on God and on our lives in the light of the gospel. With humility’s energy, we grow, please God, day by day, in an awareness of how much we depend on God, of how weak we are on our own, of how much real life comes not from ourselves but from His seeds planted in us that long to spring forth with new growth and fruit in abundance.

Humility is then the only answer to the Pharisees and to those who are corrupt in the exercise of their religious authority. For humility is integrity, as is daring to speak the name of evil when we are faced by it. Humility is, in other words, the surest way to keep a grip on the truth, and not to be satisfied with any of its many phoney replacements.

This is a lesson which is good for us, regardless of what level of authority we may possess. In this regard, we can read and reread the words that Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest, wrote about the differences between St Francis and Martin Luther in the following terms:

It is quite possible that Saint Francis of Assisi was no less disgusted than Luther by the debauchery and simony of prelates. We can even be sure that his suffering on this account was fiercer, because his nature was very different from that of the monk of Wittenberg. But Francis did not challenge iniquity; he was not tempted to confront it; instead, he threw himself into poverty, immersing himself in it as deeply as possible along with his followers. He found in poverty the very source and wellspring of all absolution and all purity. Instead of attempting to snatch from the Church all her ill-gotten goods, he overwhelmed her with invisible treasures. And under the hand of this beggar the heaps of gold and lust began blossoming like an April hedge…