From the archives: the humble servant

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 8-12) again presents us with a set of aphorisms of the Lord. You are not to be called rabbi, says the rabbi to His disciples. Neither be called instructor, says the instructor of all. And finally comes the greatest of His warnings in this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

As so often in the gospel, the Lord is here in paradoxical mode. Thus, He often says things that are apparently contradictory, but which express a truth not immediately obvious to our earthly minds. The particular form of paradox in today’s passage is hyperbole, a truth expressed via exaggeration. So, Jesus says call nobody your Father? Did He thus forbid us to call our own fathers “Dad” or our priests “Father”? Not at all. Certainly, St Paul did not think so, for it is he who points out to the Ephesians that all paternity in heaven and earth is named after the Father. So, what does the Lord mean by saying: Call no one Father? Simply, that we should make nobody but the Lord our God our ultimate father, or rabbi, or instructor. We should, in other words, have no strange gods before Him: the god of material or existential security, the god of worldly adulation, the god of fashionable opinion, the god of a self-serving anxiety whose direction we secretly seek after more than we attend to the word of the Lord. How many things do we unwittingly make our “Father” by interiorising their diktats, rather than trusting humbly in the Lord on whom we are meant to cast our every care?

Then comes the final paradox of this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. These words are mysterious indeed, for they are not to be understood only as an observation on the fate of human decision making. Taken in their moral sense, of course the first part tells us more or less that pride comes before a fall. But what about the second part: whoever humbles himself will be exalted? In another way, these words have not a moral sense but we might say a Christological sense, telling us intimately about our Saviour and His mode of dealing with us:

The greatest among you will be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Now, the words have not so much a moral sense as a historical one, for they evoke the history of our creation, our fall, and our salvation. From the beginning, the Lord was the servant of all, for it was by His labour that we were, and are, constantly brought into being. Was this labour? According to Scripture, so much was it labour that the Lord rested from it on the seventh day. Of course, we know this expression is a human one adapted to our understanding, for God is ever the same and, being pure spirit, does not suffer weariness. It was, therefore, this Servant who, when our first parents exalted themselves and brought themselves down in a humiliating ruin, humbled Himself even more than in his creative labours, poured Himself out in the incarnation, and came to save us. For which reason, again St Paul tells us, He has been given a name which is above all others.

We are reminded again here of the Lord’s call to follow Him. This is not only a following in a moral sense, but also in the sense of how we orient our inner selves. Like Him, we are called to share our very selves, and it is impossible for anybody wrapped in self-exaltation to share themselves in this way. We must, says French philosopher Gustave Thibon, either become like God through our adoration and love, or else we will find ourselves becoming false imitators of our maker; why else did the devil tempt our first parents by promising that they would be like gods?

For us, then, there remains the question of undertaking the great task expressed so often in the invitatory of the office of Matins:

Come, let us worship and bow down,

  bend the knee before the Lord who made us;

for he himself is our God and we are his flock,

  the sheep that follow his hand.

But we cannot be complacent about this. Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. We must depend utterly on Him in the process of putting to death our every act of self-seeking, which is always an act of self-exaltation. Our preferential option for the self stalks us like our shadow, entwining around our words, our thoughts, and most especially around our unconscious world. In that moment, we cannot appoint ourselves the champion to conquer the hidden armies of our revolt. Then, we are truly dependent only on the One who graciously humbles Himself to step into our flesh and to harrow the very depths of our last stronghold where we have not yet surrendered to His loving mercy. For it is He, the greatest, who makes Himself then the servant of our recovery.

  

From the archives: a seedy business

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) tells us how Jesus understands His own parable of the sower who went to sow his seed. Yet even this explanation does not exhaust the layers of meaning within it. The parable may apply in different ways to those who, it could be argued, have welcomed the seed and in whom the seed has yielded a harvest. Who among us has fully integrated the seed into our lives?

How do we hear the word of God without understanding? We do so by separating understanding of the faith from our devotions or our spiritual journey. This is arguably an even greater danger for those who have heard God’s call to intimacy and try to respond to it with more or less vigour. St Teresa of Avila preferred a learned spiritual director to a holy one; just think about that for a second. It means she was aware that mystical experience could be misleading without the compass points of the creed in all its depth and richness. In the inner life, while intimate knowledge of God comes through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, our normal progress is a life lived through faith in the mysteries and of the mysteries. Doxa (praise) and doctrine are not opposite poles, but oxen yolked together. Faith is not just conviction but conviction about something. To think of faith only as a conviction of the heart or an engagement of the will is to hear the word of God without understanding. Here, we must become literally disciples: i.e. those who learn.

The second class of people in the sower’s parable can also show themselves among the devout. They receive the seed with joy but fall away when adversity comes. If the first class of the devout suffer from lack of knowledge of the mysteries, might we say that the second class of the devout suffer from lack of self-knowledge? That and perhaps also radicality: self-knowledge because perhaps they thought quite wrongly that their initial joy in the word was proof of the depth of their discipleship; and radicality, because that discipleship requires precisely something much deeper, a greater depth of self-surrender than their current levels of maturity and self-awareness allow for. Did we think we were grown up because people address us as mister and misses?

Even the third class of people in the sower’s parable might be found among the devout in whom the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the word. For the worries of the world are not just tangible, material goods from which it might be easier in some ways to hold oneself aloof. The worries of the world can be the simple but subtle attachments that we have, for example, to how we are perceived or valued; or our belief that we deserve perhaps some grander task than the one we have ended up with. Yet this kind of fretting is also a blind spot obscuring the fact that our value and dignity in God’s eyes do not come about from what we achieve. Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire, says St Catherine of Sienna. If the world is not ablaze then, it is not because we have materially failed, and certainly not because people have failed to recognise how wonderful we disciples of Christ really are. It is because somehow, somewhere, in some subtle way we have damned up the graces that would flow out of us were we to be faithful.

But, we say, we have not gone in for the lure of riches! Look at our sacrifices! Well, that depends. Perhaps if we collect devotions and spiritual milk-bottle tops like the young now collect tattoos, we do choke ourselves with the lure of riches – riches that do not become a part of our life but lie on the surface and clutter our souls, like our unused kitchen gadgets or, heaven help us, our unread books.

Happily, our lives are a journey, not a fine art. In knowledge of God and knowledge of self, coupled with detachment, the seed of His word might produce more fruit in us yet

The two detachments and the one love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 16-23) sees Jesus in his role as Teacher or Prophet, the one who comes not only to rule as King, not only to sanctify as Priest, but also to guide and direct, to advise and enlighten, a mission that is complemented by the work of His Holy Spirit. The paradoxes come thick and fast: be wise as serpents but innocent as doves; beware of men, a paradox for Jesus has promised to make the disciples fishers of men, and how can one beware of what one is to fish? And then, those who love us best may despise us most. The prophecy of rejection must have been a shock to the disciples for their naïve Judaic imaginations probably envisaged the triumphant procession of the servants of the Messiah, whereas the Messiah among them prophesied that they would be as abject and unwelcome as Himself. This then is a cold comfort gospel for our contemplation, or is it? Only if we refuse the journeys which Jesus here bids that we take; only if we hear and hear but fail to listen to the melody that underlies it.

Simply put, this gospel calls us into harmony with two detachments: detachment from the self and detachment from others. Why must we be so detached? Are we only meant to be as cold as fish, we Christians? Not at all! Rather, the cause for both detachments is so that neither our love of self nor our love of others impede and stifle our love of God. In fact, we might go as far as to say that only those who do love God, who live in His love, who know themselves and others as beloved of the Father, and who reciprocate that love by His grace and His gift, can know what it is to love themselves wisely, and to love their neighbour as He has loved them.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, and he will remind you of all that I have said to you,

declares today’s Gospel Acclamation. That is the foundation of the love I have just evoked. That love is the complete truth: the truth about God, and the truth which we are called to live and to share with others.

And, then, we come to the impediments, the blockages, that hold us back or prevent our progress. But we cannot see them. Lost on the foggy moor of our own mind, we need adversity to bring us to an awareness of what it is we lack.

When they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak.

Why not? Because Christ has us and holds us, even when, perhaps most especially when, we feel most isolated and alone, even in our Garden of Gethsemane moments. What must it be to live those moments not overwhelmed by our own incapacities, but resting in Him who has promised us a kingdom?

Do not worry about how to speak or what to say.

But we worry incessantly, Lord, because we have not yet lost trust in ourselves. We say it is because we do not know what to say, or that there is nothing to say, or that nothing can be said. How often do we feel such things in the maelstrom of absurdity that is the twenty-first century? But our problem will ever be the same: we have been trusting in ourselves too much and not trusting enough in Him. We have taken the obligation to prudence and imagined it was the same as Wisdom. But Wisdom is a higher thing; it is not a human calculation but a divine insight that somehow makes sense; that makes sense because it is the fruit of His love, not of our mistaken self-belief.

But there is another detachment which still remains to come about: detachment from others. Jesus warns us that all our securities may yet be torn from us by the fallibility of men:

Brother will betray brother to death…children will rise against their parents…You will be hated by all men on account of my name.

Here again, the logic is similar to the logic of the detachment from self. We must not be detached because we are cold; rather, we must be detached so that our hearts can burn with the true fuel of love which is the will of the Father. We long for communion, but we too readily forget that our baptism calls us to root all communion in the Communion of Love that is the Blessed Trinity. So fundamental is this to us that this Communion is now to be preferred to all other communions; indeed, it is so fundamental to all communions that every communion not rooted in their Divine Communion is a mere illusion. The whole world could be united, living side by side in a most perfect harmony of sentiment, but if that sentiment were the love of this world’s promises, or the neglect of God, what harmony could it truly offer?

Peace is not peace unless it is first rooted in God’s peace which comes through forgiveness of sins. Concord is only fake concord unless it is rooted first in the reconciliation of the wayward children with their Father in heaven.

And this is why the man who stands firm to the end will be saved: not because stoicism and endurance are the source of our salvation, but because the raging love of God is. And when we love God truly above all things, and trust only in Him, then our love of self and love of our neighbour become what they are meant to be: an imitation of, and participation in, the unceasing and ever flowing love of the Most High.

 

 

 

The look of love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 9:32-37) sees Jesus cure a demoniac to which the Pharisees respond by concluding He is in league with the devil himself. He goes about Israel, proclaiming the good news, healing those who are sick and reconciling those lost in their sins. Having given this example, His heart is filled with compassion for those He ministers to, and He says to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few..  

On one level, this gospel is especially about the priestly vocation, the vocation to be a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and to gather in the harvest in due season. No matter the criticisms of Pharisees and others, the priest must pursue the work of the Lord out of compassion for the multitude. Nevertheless, these duties of the priesthood are paralleled by a wider collective duty imposed on all of us, and that we reflect on all too little, to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Parishes are being closed or amalgamated all over our country and in other European countries. Diocesan quangos with multiple MBAs are writing the taglines about being “Ready for mission” or “Sent to bear fruit”, but evangelical bromides can never cover up the corporate failure of self-knowledge. If we lament our lack of priests or the sadly ageing priesthood, we should also collectively lament, first, our failure to honour the vocation that feeds the priestly production line, the vocation of marriage with its call to fruitfulness, and second, our collective sin of omission to hear and obey this command of the Lord to beg for the extraordinary blessing of priestly vocations. If we do not sow with the Carmelites in prayer and sacrifice, we will not reap like the apostles.

In one sense, of course, all vocations are extraordinary. What a thing it is, what a beautiful thing it is, for the Lord to call our name and to say to us: Follow me.

If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

At the root of our personal vocations and the paths we take in our lives is this wider command, the universal call to holiness, to be conformed to the image of Christ, as adopted children of the Father so that He find in us the image of His son.

And yet the priestly vocation includes that conformity to Christ which encompasses His own relationship with His Mystical Body, the Church. People often prefer the language of the “people of God” these days, but that can be a very public and collective sort of phrase. The term the “Mystical Body”, celebrated by Pope Pius XII in his letter Mystici Corporis, says something not only deeply Pauline but also deeply intimate and spiritual, just as the body is intimate and spiritual, the person – the individual - incarnate. Now, the priest, the labourer who is sent to the harvest, shares Christ’s role as the privileged intimate partner of the Mystical Body. For only Christ as high priest, as head of the Mystical Body, ministers to that body, gives to it the spousal gifts of the seven Sacraments, and so helps it become day by day His worthy spouse, and fruitful beyond all measure.

This incidentally is why the priesthood cannot be reduced to a mere social function, to be seized on and instrumentalised by any individual, whether because they are socially privileged, or because of some ambient gender equality that is blind to the mystery that it represents. The sin of clericalism, an excessive reverence for the clergy, is only the opposite vice of anticlericalism, an excessive disrespect for the clergy. Somewhere in the middle stands a proper spiritually anchored and wisely tempered reverence for the priest as an icon of Christ, symbolised so beautifully in the customs of our Syro-Malakara or Syro-Malabar brothers and sisters who kiss the hands of their priests - not as an act of priestcraft but because the priest too is a kind of sacrament, the outward human sign of the inward grace of Christ who acts through him.

Every individual can reflect Christ in some way; this is the universal call to holiness. But just as in the Sacrament of the Eucharist only the foodstuffs of bread and wine can be turned into the body and blood of Christ for our spiritual nourishment, so in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, only a man can be made the icon of Christ's relationship with His spouse, the Church.

And in some mysterious way, the relationship is reciprocal. The priest who has left home and family and brothers and sisters and wealth can, if he lives the mystery of his priesthood in the spirit of Christ, discover that he is repaid a hundredfold in this life. For just as we have a duty to pray for more labourers to be sent into the harvest, so we have a duty to care for the labourers who are already there, men who are both privileged and afflicted by a calling which, according to some, requires of them all to be crucified before the end.

In answer to the many betrayals by priests who have become abusers, we have often heard tell of the serious difficulties of the priesthood. These should not be underestimated, of course. But no vocation can be understood and grasped only by its difficulties. Every vocation has its difficulties. The spirit of a culture of vocation is found rather in the beauty and the truth of every vocation. Perhaps, if we were to understand the beauty of our own vocations, we would live them with greater fidelity. For we love our grumbles and groans. But how much more have we cause to find in the blessed calling which each and every one of us has been given a glimpse of – just a small glimpse – the beauty of our loving God who pours out His heart for every one of us, even to the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His earthly life.

Every vocation then includes a calling to understand His compassion. Instead of looking down at our own misery, we should look up to try to catch in our Master’s eye that eternal compassion, His willingness to look upon the crowds who are harassed and helpless, casting upon them the gaze of a Shepherd who wishes to gather the sheep to Himself. And then, fixing it in our memories, we should go and try to share that same compassion wherever we can.