From the archives: of salt and light

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

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Today's gospel (Matthew 5: 13-16) sees Jesus deliver a teaching that is all about the self-awareness of the disciple. Jesus addresses His disciples with two metaphors: you are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world. The stakes of self-awareness enter into the equation when He invites the disciples to reflect on whether they are faithful to these challenges of discipleship: let your light shine before others. Self-awareness and an awareness of others that is oriented towards their good, not one’s own.

In both cases - salt and light - it is a matter of balance. On the one hand the salt must not be tasteless. Salt induces the sense of taste precisely by stimulating the sensitivity of taste buds. If food is not excessively salted, what we taste is the food that is enhanced, not the salt. In the case of the disciples, what is interesting is that Jesus calls them the salt of the earth. God made the earth and everything in it: every joyous thing - from the scent of a delicate flower to the pleasures of marital union - is His gift. But sin alienates as from every good thing, and it is only within the framework of our relationship with Almighty God that we can rediscover the truth of things, even of ourselves. In this sense, discipleship must itself be a journey of incarnation in which divine grace reshapes the fabric of the world and the fabric of our lives in it according to His image. When the Holy Spirit moves the Gift of Knowledge in us, we read deeply into things of the earth the imprint of the finger of God. Beyond the physical appearances lie the mysteries of the love that conceived and created everything around us. Perhaps, if we are faithful, others too will discern that mystery through what they see in us: in that perspective, we can be the salt that awakens them to the mystery just waiting for them.

But I said above that this is a matter of balance, and perhaps this is better seen in the second metaphor of the gospel: you are the light of the world. On Ash Wednesday, we will hear Jesus tell us to hide ourselves away when we pray and do penance. In today’s gospel, we hear Him command the opposite: let our light shine before men. In other words, just as salt must be balanced, so too must light. We must not hide away unnecessarily; even Jesus chose his moments to speak but sometimes fled the crowds and would not disclose His intentions. Not to hide our light is a matter of just being who we are. While this commands integrity, it also requires discretion. Jesus’ command is to be the light of the world, but there is a difference between being the light of the world and trying to shine that light directly into someone’s eyes! This differs according to context and individual. Some people are ready to look for the light; yet others are so accustomed to darkness that a rude illumination is as likely - if not more likely - to provoke them to screw their eyes up tight, rather than opening them.

While being the salt of the earth requires the Gift of Knowledge, being the light of the world requires the movements of the Gift of Counsel: the gift of knowing when and how to intervene, of when to echo the words of Jesus and when to emulate His silence. The divine gifts we cannot use of our own accord. All we can do is beg the Holy Spirit to move them in us; all we can do is try to remove every obstacle in us to their movement, readying ourselves to be docile instrument in the hands of the Master. Even then, only He can truly prepare us for that service which we are called to give. We must beg from him even our beggar’s voice, as Fabrice Hadjadj says.

Then, both we and those for whom we aspire to be both salt and light may be able one day to give praise together to our Father in heaven.   

 

Going after strange gods

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 28-34) marks a contrast with the gospel of Tuesday. Then, Jesus was approached by some of the more dishonest scribes, looking to ensnare Him in questions. Today, we have one of the honest ones, sincerely wondering and pondering, thinking about God, questioning himself, wanting to discern honestly who Jesus was, and trying to hear God’s call in his daily life. Jesus meets him, responds to his question, and we hear in the scribe’s quiet reaction – well spoken, Master, what you have said is true – a sign that Jesus’ words hit home, went to the man’s heart, and spoke to his concerns not only about the Scriptures but, at least implicitly, about Him.

What did he want to know anyway? In essence, he wanted to know the most important commandment. Why? Because what we put first defines who we are and tells others who we are. This question could hardly have been a point of dispute among the scribes, but it was surely the right question to discern who Jesus was, or rather where He was from. For who but somebody on God’s side would put the love of God above all other things? My kingdom is not of this world. Jesus is not in search of Himself or in search of what He can accumulate for Himself, as we too often are. His heart is turned to the Father, rapt in an inner prayer of contemplation and love, even as He goes about His daily business. And the mood music of this inner attention is captured precisely by those words:

Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. […] and you must love your neighbour as yourself.

Note here also the first clause that lays emphasis on God’s identity first:  the Lord our God is the one Lord. Some might say that this was emphasised because polytheism was the cultural context in which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses after the Jews had been living for so long with their Egyptian polytheist slave owners.

Yet there is something more here. Human nature in its sinfulness is inclined more or less towards dislodging God from His central place in our hearts and to squeezing in something else in His place, often ourselves, sometimes other things insofar as they serve our purposes. We do not see or know ourselves as idolators, but that is because we do not know ourselves well enough, or see how we honour our wayward needs, pamper our desires, sacrifice important things on the bonfire of our own vanities, or place ourselves unconsciously ahead of God and neighbour. Yet our call is not to be perfect in our own eyes, but to give our all to God so He can make us what He intends us to be. The Lord our God is the one Lord and so our lives must in some senses be a hunt for the idols that we consciously or unconsciously try to sneak into their honoured places in our interior castles.

These idols are obvious when they are central to some sin or other: greed or anger, laziness, or hostility. Yet they can lurk or hide away also in hidden corners where the light shines less: our unexamined needs, our wayward tendencies which we turn a blind eye to, those indulgences that provoke just a minor itch without ever really coming to the surface of our minds, but which corrode our efforts all the same.

Since loving God seems such a lovely and pleasant end to which to be called, you would think that we would run towards it without a trace of hesitation. And yet here we are, years after we have known our calling, still lingering in the doldrums of self-obsession instead of charging across the ocean of God’s goodness, sails filled with the winds of His love.

Lord make me know your ways, the ways to your heart, the ways to serve my neighbour, and the ways to break free of the slavery that my own wayward heart still hankers for.

The Lord our God is the one Lord: we must have no strange gods before him, and least of all, ourselves.

  

Two swords

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 13-17) contains two stories in one: the story of how Jesus’ enemies tried once more to trap him in His words and failed – failed calamitously and humiliatingly. Their attempt to ensnare him, inspired no doubt by the devil himself, backfired spectacularly as Jesus delivered one of His most memorable teachings.

And there is the second story: that we should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. What a teaching to be echoed down the history of the Church, from the first days of the Christians in Roman-occupied Palestine to the days of the Roman empire, from the initiation of Christendom under Constantine to the development of the doctrine concerning the power of the two swords by Pope St Gelasius, and throughout all the subsequent relations between Church and State down to our present day, where the State often continues to bully the Church when it can, and when corrupt churchmen sometimes mistake their duty to evangelise with worldly entanglements in the powers of this world.

Sometimes Christians mistake this doctrine as a contempt for worldly power, but that is not so. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s: Caesar does have a proper sphere of power, and we honour God in honouring that power, for God is the source of all authority, as St Paul teaches.

And yet, that power has its limits in two ways. First, it does not extend to all the resources of human fulfilment. In the end, the powers of this world do not render us whole, even if good government and stable societies can be hugely valuable in bringing about our happiness. It is easy to scorn our corrupt and calamitous western powers, but I thank God very often that I do not live in a tin-pot dictatorship, a communist enclave, or some unruly state where one is never sure whether the water will run in the morning. I don’t mind tax in principle, even if I believe I am overtaxed! Yet, my point here is a spiritual one. Politics and even the goods of society do not complete us; even the wonders of a harmonious community do not define us. Deep down, we are called to something greater and more sublime for we have here no abiding city. Do we think about what that means to us as often as we should? Or do we find ourselves troubled by the instability of this troubled world? Too many of us break our hearts over outcomes we should have expected: the eternal disappointments of the all too human powers that rule us.

Yet the second way that the power of Caesar has its limits lies in the boundaries that it ought to respect and often does not. Justice must be done insofar as it can be. Caesar in this sense must do two things: render to men the things that are men’s, and also render to God the things that are God’s. We have come to think of the religious domain as something totally estranged from the spiritual. And yet, what does it mean for England to be Our Lady’s Dowry if not some kind of recognition, captured beautifully in the famous Wilton Diptych, that a State can recognise the legitimate claims of Christ; that a State can undo the ignorance and scepticism of Pontius Pilate, and when Christ declares Himself to be the truth, reply not What is truth? but rather, To whom else would we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life. This is the foundation on which St Thomas More's final words will rest: I die the king's good servant but God's first. Why? Precisely because St Thomas heard this teaching; it is not a doctrine somehow removed from our spiritual lives but it runs right through the war of powers that can tear through our flesh and our spirits - the war of the individual with the collective. We must seek peace with all, but in the end, God's cause comes first, even if it makes us criminals... In that too, we must be ready to follow the Lord who died a criminal, an outlaw, a rebel against legitimate authority. 

Political theology is not some special brand of the sacred sciences for people who like the broadsheet newspapers. It is how Christians have tried to see the reality and consequences of the gospel in the public square, not locking up the seeds of the good news in some private, comfortable space where we are all cosy members of a close-knit club, but taking it into the open so that it can help reshape laws such as those that concern respect for life or economic justice. In this sense, the domains of Caesar and of God overlap each other not as contrary powers but as elements that unite two crucial dimensions of our souls. For man is a social being, and the privatisation of religion only lays a path towards its increasing irrelevance.

When we render to God the things that are God’s and when Caesar does likewise, we are all a step closer to that kingdom to which He calls us.