The limits of dialogue

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

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Today’s gospel (John 10: 22-30) takes place at the time of the Feast of Dedication, a solemnity marking the reconsecration of the Temple under Judas Maccabeus after its desecration. In this scene, He whose body is the Temple of Temples clashes with the children of Israel who question Him once more about whether He is the Christ. His reply disappoints them for He says He has already told them by word and by work. Then, returning to the theme of being a shepherd, He acclaims His Lordship over His sheep, His sheep’s recognition of Him, and His Father’s relationship to the flock. Lastly, He declares the mystery of mysteries that He and the Father are one.

On one level this scene is a clash of words and a dialogue of the deaf, at least on one side. Yet, it is important to remember something as we listen in to its beginnings: the first question about whether He is the Christ is a question in bad faith. Jesus, who sits and eats with sinners, who greets the woman at the well, and who speaks to Nicodemus in the night, follows in this scene the opposite strategy. At least, while He speaks and speaks abundantly, He does not enter a dialogue. Some today turn dialogue into a theological virtue; Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life, chooses here a totally contrary route. Is then Jesus the causer of the division?

Diplomats and peace brokers would tell us, yes, Jesus clearly here perpetuates division. Here, they would say, Jesus shows us His limits and His negativity. Here, they might conclude, Jesus shows us perhaps His death wish to become a martyr. Better to bring in the professional negotiators, the ones who know the honeyed words of concord and how to avoid division. Maybe Jesus can yet be saved from the cross – such a messy death. Or at least He could be stopped from urging His disciples to follow His example and do violence to themselves – remember His words about cutting off hands and plucking out eyes? For as all wise people know, those who do violence to themselves should probably be in an institution.

On another tack of course, as the Prime Minister of Israel recently told the world’s press, Unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan … if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Next time you meet any followers of Genghis Khan, do be sure to admit this to them. If Jesus wanted peace, He ought really to have come with His armies, and conquered all comers, crushing them, and adding it to His CV as He manifested Himself to the pinnacle of His career as the Messiah. There speaks the wisdom of this world, and the wisdom of Jesus’ interlocutors in today’s gospel.  

Here we are reminded again that all truths are paradoxical. God is Three and One; Mary is Mother and Virgin; the Eucharist is Sacrifice and Sacrament. And the truth that we must respect the consciences of others – as Jesus respected the consciences of His interlocutors – is paradoxically balanced by the truth that while erroneous consciences cannot be forced, they must be called out, if not in words, then in deeds. They must be called out firstly by being confronted by a contrary example. We cannot simulate concord; concord can only be crafted out of the bones of truth. Then erroneous consciences must be called out not by accusation – only Jesus may do that – but by simple witness, even perhaps the witness of silence. It may not be opportune to speak or to act but it is never opportune to dissimulate, not concerning the truths of salvation. When asked why he wrote his first book Under Satan’s Sun, a modern rehearsal of the life of a priest like St John Vianney, French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos replied: I wanted to bear witness before I died.  He wanted to speak truth into the immoral and nihilistic chaos of interwar France, following his master Jesus who speaks truth into the chaos of first-century Jerusalem, who speaks truth into the chaos of every one of us in our hearts. Let’s not let our consciences be deceived about how fragile our settlement with Him really is; how we need the living occupation of the Prince of Peace in our hearts for He came to make His home with us. Then and only then can we belong to the flock that He holds so that nobody may snatch it from Him, least of all the diplomats and the peacemakers.

How can this defensive negativity of Jesus do any good, wonders the wisdom of the world? You may well ask. How can the cross do any good? How could being born into obscurity do any good? How could choosing illiterate amateurs over professional scripture scholars do any good? How could allowing Himself to be delivered into the hands of His enemies do any good? How can the Prince of Peace stake a claim on peace by becoming the victim of the very violence He came to prevent? The answer to all these questions is simple and is found just two chapters later in St John’s gospel when Jesus communicates a message to the Greek gentiles who come to question Him:

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.

To which thought St Paul adds the following corollary:

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

If it is foolish, we can rest assured that the foolishness of God is greater than the wisdom of men.

Bearing with the hatred

 A recording of today's gospel (for the Solemnity of St George) and a reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 18-21) comes from the discourse of Jesus during the Last Supper. In it we hear Jesus again drawing out the paradox that no matter how we love the world and those around us – just as God so loved the world – we cannot expect that the world will reciprocate our affection. Indeed, it may be that we become objects of hate and abuse, victims of the persecutory spirit that has blown through the hearts and minds of men ever since Cain raised his hand in anger against his brother Abel. Yet, in all this, the disciple can take heart, for to suffer persecution in the name of Jesus is to become like Him, a persecuted emissary of the Father, an ambassador of the vineyard owner whose tenants have turned on their landlord. It is an old story and should not surprise us, although in our sweet naivety, we don’t see it coming. The servant is not greater than the Master, nor indeed will the tenants have the last say.

The very last line of this extract is in some ways its most striking: all these things they will do to you on account of my name because they do not know him who sent me. This is not merely true of our persecutors, however; it is true of us too. All our bad behaviour comes from this root: that we do not know the Father. We see this attested even within the Church, for we are all a mixture of good and bad, and as the Dominican Fr Clerissac says, to suffer for the Church, it may be necessary to suffer at the hands of the Church. Ignorance of the Father is a necessary condition that explains the waywardness of the persecutors, but it is not yet a sufficient explanation. For that, we must consider the other source of all our troubles: that we humans do not know ourselves; that the light of self-knowledge we grasped yesterday has dimmed and faded; that the posturing figments of our inner rich man block out the reality of our real poverty; that the uprightness we sensed in our last action seems missing from our next action. Like an old-fashioned analogue radio signal, our fidelity comes and goes, and we fail to appreciate the immense blessing of being called to stand as shorn and shivering lambs in the violent blasts of the world’s intemperate hostility.

In those moments, we need light from without and from within, and here Jesus offers us both. It is natural for us to wish to be in harmony with our neighbours or our fellow countrymen. We are social animals, even we hyper-individualists of the twenty-first century. Yet Jesus warns us clearly to prepare ourselves to be deprived of the consolations of that harmony and the warmth of fellow feeling: they will hate us, if we are true. At best, they will not understand us and grumble at our strangeness. Having entered into the service of God, we must prepare ourselves to do without.

But is this to our loss? We need to understand it is but a temporary situation. Our fellowship is now first with God, the source and foundation of our being and our calling, who calls us precisely into a unity distinct from the human herd, first with Himself, then with the other members of His mystical body, and only then with our fellow humans. God does not destroy human unity but reinvents it, re-creates it, in Himself.

When we die, says Thomas More to his friend the Duke of Norfolk, and you go to heaven for doing your conscience and I go to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me…for fellowship? In that scene in a Man for All Seasons, we hear crystallised the dilemmas of this passage from the gospel. The faithful disciple knows, tastes, bears the consequences of his or her choices, of the preferential option for God, of the burden that is Jesus’ cross, before knowing the surge of universe-defying energy and the life-restoring excesses of the Resurrection.

To restate St Athanasius’s words, therefore, all of us are called to become God, i.e. to become one with Him through a union of love; otherwise, we are condemned to choose a path of hate on which we fake our divine election like the devil, collapse inwards on our suppurating wound of self-centeredness, and turn thereby against the very neighbour we are meant to share an eternal destiny with beside the Lord.

Yet since we are not greater than our Master, the recourse He invokes is our recourse also: we can, like Him, call upon the name of the Lord, of the Father, and thus we will in the end be delivered from our enemies because we know the Father.

And having gone out to in sorrow, we will bring the harvest home with joy.

From the archives: a reflection on the true meat and drink of the Christian

 A recording of the gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (John 6: 52-59) gives us more words of Christ upon the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jesus says these words in the synagogue at Capernaum, so in front of a very motley assortment of listeners. They are not words spoken in private but in the full glare of publicity.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, He says - undoubtedly to the astonishment of the audience.

He references the Jewish memory of the feeding of the people of God in the desert with manna. But He notes that they all died, whereas those that feed on His flesh will live forever.

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To cite again the words of Flannery O'Connor,

You will know the truth and the truth will make you strange.

Imagine the bewilderment of those who listened to this sermon of Jesus. Those who lived in Capernaum knew Jesus best of all, but surely with this one He had them flummoxed. Was this man who spoke so beautifully about God as the Father in heaven some kind of secret cannibal? Was He really just a pagan for who but the pagans consumed blood? We cannot get a sense of how these words were received without understanding the taboos that Jesus was breaking - not just human taboos but religious ones as well.

Men cannot take too much reality, says T.S. Eliot, and undoubtedly there is something very real in the need for pre-evangelization. And yet, as we see here, sometimes Jesus simply speaks the truth into the universe with full confidence, knowing that He is only the sower. The drama of redemption moves to its second act not with the preacher’s flattering words or diplomatic speech, but only when the heart of the listener recognises some responsibility that must be assumed. In other words, these shocking truths that we read in the gospel were accompanied by actual graces from the heart of Christ as they reached the hearts of the assembly. Those who preach the gospel cannot evaluate their effectiveness simply on the basis of how many people embrace their message. That is a far too human-centred view of evangelization. If we wish to speak of Christ to others, of His shocking doctrines, and if we wish others to hear, then our labour must be built on the foundation of prayer and sacrifice, as was that of Jesus. In the 19th century, two priests from England went to visit St John Marie Vianney, the famous and holy parish priest of the village of Ars, north of Lyons, to ask his advice:

We have preached and tried to spread the word, but nothing seems to work, they complained. What should we do?

Did you fast and do penance? the saint replied. Did you take the discipline? Did you sleep on the floor?

We do not know what these English priests did, but we do know that the parish priest of Ars is known the world over as the patron of pastors. The mistake of these priests was to think in purely worldly terms about the effectiveness of their preaching, and this is one of the observations that we can make today about this gospel. In purely human terms, the doctrine of the Eucharist is simply dropped on the heads of these listeners, so why should they believe it? While the words simply belong to the material universe that we occupy, the power that brings any soul to Christ belongs to God. The preacher might be better off spending fifteen minutes writing his sermon and forty-five minutes on his knees before the Tabernacle, just as Jesus’ sermons and parables stood upon a foundation of nights spent in prayer to the Father of all.

To imagine that the effectiveness of the preacher is related to what he says to the listener is, as I have said, a very human mistake - we should say a very worldly one. But those that have the same worldly spirit are the ones who struggle to understand what Jesus is saying in this gospel. Jesus proposes that they need to eat His flesh and drink His blood; it is only later that He will show the apostles how this is to be done. But in order to help His listeners, He also references the history of the Israelites wandering in the desert:

This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

How are we to understand this, since we have seen our loved ones receive communion at the altar before later watching their coffins standing before the sanctuary? Is this a promise of Jesus that has not been realised? To hear these words in such a way would again be far too worldly. When Jesus speaks of the death of the Israelites in the desert after eating manna, He does not mean their physical death but their spiritual death. Manna and quail fed their bodies, but they did not feed their souls. They nourished their bellies but not their hearts. And this too is crucial.

The grace of Christ, whether in the Eucharist or in any of the sacraments, or wherever it is encountered in the spiritual life, does not only elevate but heals. Its purpose is to cure us of the poison of sin. At the same time, in the gospel the symbol of feasting, of eating and drinking, is for those who are already on the journey of the Christian life or for those who have reached the end. The journey begins with death and resurrection. If a man collapses and has no heartbeat, the last thing he needs is a square meal. He probably needs defibrillation; he may need adrenaline. It wouldn't be kindness to heat up a tin of soup and pour it down his throat in the hope of bringing some warmth back into his increasingly blueish cheeks. It wouldn’t be Jesus’ way to preach to the man the peacefulness of a heart that never beats. Peace be to you, says the Risen Christ, but He says it with the smile of a conquer who came not to bring peace but the sword, who came to destroy the empire of sin.  

Jesus preached the Eucharist and shocked a religion horrified at the idea of consuming blood. To us He preaches the cross and we are horrified at the idea of abandoning our own desires. In both cases, Jesus alone remains the antidote to a poison that simply cannot be ignored.   

I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified, says St Paul to the Corinthians. For only the crucified Lord heals us of sin, and only the crucified Lord becomes the bread of life.

For, as we know, all other breads will perish.

A little light on the matter

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection is available here.

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In today’s gospel (John 3: 31-36), Jesus continues the conversation with Nicodemus which we have been listening to all week. It is not a long passage, and we need not delay long over the details. But it serves to bring out one of the themes that tend to be less evoked and which we have little inclination to reflect on: that the Light came into this world and the world received Him not.

These are words that haunted St John. They appear in any case in the opening of his gospel where the alignment of God, of His truth, and of the act of testimony, are made clear to the reader: the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

This clash of light and dark is not just a cosmic and global phenomenon, shaping our heavens and our horizons. Rather, it is the very story that unfolds in the life of every human, for again, as St John says: The true Light which enlightens every man was coming into the world.

Our God, the God from God and Light from Light, descends from His transcendent heights not to play with us, like some Greek divinity, but to live with us, to sup with us, converse with us like Nicodemus in the night, and to suffer and die along us, rising on the third day. This is how He enlightens us, and to those who receive Him, He gives the Spirit without measure. We do not reflect enough on this: the communication of the Spirit in such generosity, the riches that are ours at the price of opening our hearts to the Light.

But there is the other side of the drama too, a mystery of iniquity, that not everyone wills to receive this Light. We cannot presume on the state of anyone’s conscience, but we take too much our ease in believing that good will is universal, and everyone is good deep down. None are good in that simplistic sense; we are all a battlefield of good and evil, even the most sincere.

Mors et vita duello

Conflixere mirando.

Death and life are in a duel that astonishes us all, as the Sequence of Easter says. Salvation is not a walk in the park or a health spa for the rose-tinted optimists among us. Again, Jesus in today’s gospel:

Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on Him.

Triumph in this battle, however, does not come from our efforts. The weight is not on our shoulders, or it is but only insofar as we source all our strength and goodness in the one Saviour. And thus, the Easter Sequence, which echoes still in our hearts, concludes with the great Christian paradox:

Dux vitae mortuus

Regnat vivus.

The Leader of Life dies yet reigns and is alive.

A little touch of Jesus in the night

 An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 3: 7-15) continues the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus in the night. They continue to speak of the Spirit of whom all must be born again, but who, as Jesus tells the Teacher of Israel, blows where He will. It is necessary for Jesus at this point to underline for Nicodemus his own ignorance, for despite all his great learning, the Pharisee cannot yet perceive the depth and the full truth of Jesus’ message. Yet in the end, as Jesus concludes, it will not be learning that brings salvation but the sight of, and belief in, the Son of Man, lifted up for all to see.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, presumably so as not to be observed. Yet the night in which he comes is our night also. The night has this double meaning: for on the one hand, we are blind and stumble about, unable to piece together the fragments of our understanding and the shards of our pain, while on the other hand, as the saying goes, the night brings counsel. The night brings the vision that the busyness and noise of the day obscure.

And still, that vision must come through a surrender to the Spirit who blows where He will. In the beginning the Spirit hovered over the still waters. But while He now hovers over the turbulent waters of our hearts, we cannot quite know His coming and His going, from where He blows and wither He is headed. What is this image for Jesus but a sign to Nicodemus that all His learning cannot contain God or indeed restrain Him? This is not an indication that God is arbitrary, a divinity that makes and breaks the rules of His own reality; God cannot make light darkness or darkness light. God does not call sin good or goodness evil. At the same time, as C. S. Lewis says of the lion Aslan, He is not a tame lion. We cannot relate to Him as to a mathematical formula that is lifeless; He is, as John Donne calls Him, a three-personed God. Donne’s poem, moreover, captures the difficulty of relating to Him, to Them, which comes not only from their not being a tame God of formulaic predictability but also from our own unsteady and unreliable hearts:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The blowing of the Spirit does not contradict our understanding of doctrine or dogma, but the words of the latter refer to mysteries whose depth and vitality are as yet unclear to us, and this to such an extent that the greatest mind of Christendom, St Thomas Aquinas, having had a vision of God, said in his dying hours that all he had written was as straw when compared to the reality of God. He might simply have said in that moment that the Spirit blows where He wills, and often what He wills is way beyond our ken.

How do we then listen for that Spirit, for His truth and for His call to us? How divine His movements? How consult Him in His unfathomable mystery? While we must allow Him not to be a tame Spirit, yet we have a compass point of sorts, some form of orientation even in this night. And we can find its rallying point where the beams of the cross intersect and hold up for all to see the Son of Man.

There, at the end of this gospel passage, Jesus evokes an event that is still hidden from Nicodemus, even though its truth – the truth of the healing power of one who is apparently the source of poison – was foreshadowed by Moses when he made the serpent of brass that healed the Israelites in the desert. For wherever the Spirit blows, He necessarily blows through the upright beam and spreading arms of the cross on which the Son hangs, like the wind blowing through the great arms of a windmill. Perhaps this is why Jesus says:

We speak of whom we know and bear witness to what we have seen.

Yet it is the Father whom They know, and to whom they bear witness. The Son, who will be raised up, and the Spirit, who blows where He wills, thus collaborate through the sending of the Son and the communication of the Spirit, to bring the life of the entire Blessed Trinity to those who are, like Nicodemus, lost in the night.