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.
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