The wages of suffering

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 24-28) challenges us in our deepest understanding of what it means to be a success in life. If we will be His disciples, then, like those Sons of Thunder James and John, and like Peter, the newly appointed pope, who had just been rebuked as Satan by the Lord Himself in verse 23 of this chapter, we too must be ready to lose ourselves to save our souls, or at least to lose the idea we have made of ourselves, our own unwitting deity of the hearth. Let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me, says the Lord. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. A man may yet gain the whole world, but if it comes at the price of his eternal soul, what is that really worth? For God will repay every person according to what he has done, and what if one of us has chosen the appearances over the reality, or the temporal over the everlasting?

Sometimes, the gospel calls us to encounter the Lord, and then we are overwhelmed with awe at the Master and Shepherd on whose face we dare to cast our gaze, But sometimes the gospel calls us not so much to encounter the Lord but to take a look at ourselves, and before we know it, the Scriptures hold up a mirror before our stained and deformed faces, and then Lord help us if we refuse in our hearts to perceive what our mind’s eye is given to see.

We humans are born romantics with a longing for the safety of the womb. No wonder we get excited at the exaltation of our hearts over the consolations of wisdom or even, God help us, at the excitement of something we hardly realise is probably cheap and nasty religious sensationalism. But here in this gospel, the Lord points firmly to the path that leads to eternal wisdom, and to our surprise, it is not along a dainty primrose path to nicer feelings, but rather via that stoney road that leads us to Mount Calvary where eternal joy embraces an abyss of temporary sorrow. Not that way, Lord, surely, we say; even St Therese of Lisieux said it. And, yet we hear again and again the words of the Lord:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

This is not by the way a school of stoicism. Christ is not issuing His disciples merely with an agenda of heroic forbearance, like some Navy Seal instructor. Notice the pronouns: follow me; deny himself. This is not a code primarily, but a creed not of self-belief but of belief in the Eternal Other. It is a call to cast our eyes upon Him who promises to be for us the source of all our strength:

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

And, then, St Paul will give echo to this reality:

I live; now not I, but Christ lives in me.

If we in that moment have not the courage to say our fiat beneath the cross, what does it matter? Let us invite Him to say His fiat to the Father in us! And from that moment, we can allow our sails to be filled again with the gentle breeze of His Holy Spirit, resigning ourselves not to our misery, but rather to His kind embrace that picks us up and carries us forward. Then, perhaps, when we have wept for our sins, we can smile a little on our own misery, no longer wounded in our pride by our consistent inconsistency, but touched like Him with compassion for the broken.

Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

In that surrender to His almighty hand lies in fact the secret of our personal vocations, our particular callings, by which we are meant to reflect some dimension of the beauty of the Eternal One. When Jesus says to lose our lives, He does not mean our real lives in Him, but our fake lives, our tawdry and self-constructed lives, the ghastly castles we have built from our pound-shop plans and our mass-produced lusts; the lives our impoverished imaginations have designed, the existences our grasping fingers have drawn in the sands of our passing years. This is what we must lose; not the things that reflect Him and thus invigorate us, but the things that are merely the grotesque reflection of our own lack of eternal aspiration. There, where we have wedded our hearts not to His dreams but to our cheap designs: that is where the axe must be laid to the root of the tree.

This is no once-and-for-all moment, it is a daily duty, for the cross must be taken up every day. Cats have nine lives, they say, but the old man in us seems to be capable of an endless number of zombie-like resuscitations, stirring from the ashes of our last repentance, attempting to draw us back down into the mire that we never quite lose the taste for. Such is the legacy of original sin, overcome but never entirely erased, as even St Paul could testify:

To keep me from being too elated, he tells the Corinthians, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

In this incarnational agenda, therefore, our own life story finds its glory, but only and always at the end of the journey that goes by the royal way of the cross.

Blind in both eyes

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 15: 1-2, 10-14) brings us another episode in which Jesus is questioned insincerely by the Pharisees and scribes. The extract read in today’s liturgy omits verses 3-9 in which Jesus demonstrates the Pharisees’ insincerity with regard to the fourth commandment, making it void so one of their rules could be observed. Quoting Isaiah, He tells the crowd:

This people honours me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
 in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.

We do, however, hear Jesus explain that food cannot make a person impure; rather, impurity is the effect of a wayward heart. As for the Pharisees, He concludes, they are blind guides, and their actions will bring about their own doom and the doom of those who blindly follow them.

This then is a spikey encounter that occurs during the late Galilean ministry but before Peter’s appointment as the ‘rock’ and Jesus’ final journey towards Jerusalem. It is a gospel which encourages us to reflect on the mystery of our own call as disciples: a call to listen and hear carefully, but a call also to internalise the lessons given. Do we consciously sit everyday at His feet and try to hear His gospel? Are we doing so even now, letting its words search our hearts and test our deepest motives?

The case of the Pharisees should stand as a warning to us, as we undergo that process. Who were reputedly the best Jews if not the Pharisees? Who knew the Scriptures better, and who observed the law more carefully than they? And yet, Jesus criticises them mercilessly – if such an epithet can be said of the merciful Saviour. How did they end up as the blind ones, leading other blind followers into the pit? We are accustomed to think of mysteries only in a positive sense, but here we are faced with a kind of mystery of iniquity.  

Jesus’ words suggest two problems. The easier one to understand is simply that the Pharisees are blind guides. Human beings proceed by insight. Even those who prefer to think of their religion as an affair of the heart require some kind of light where their minds perceive the truth to lie. That is why it is so dangerous just to be a sentimentalist. As Chesterton said, the aim of opening one’s mind, as of opening one’s mouth, is to close it again on something solid. The need for insight and direction, indeed, our lack of insight and direction, is brought home to us by Jesus describing Himself as the way, the truth and the life: the way for we need His direction, and the truth for our minds are like an image of the Son’s relationship to the Father, begetting truth through internalising the act of another’s being (not that the Father causes the being of the Son; their being is one, but it is always hard to speak of that mystery!). When Jesus says the blind cannot lead the blind, He is saying that error cannot of itself lead to anything but error. Notice He does not say here that we must focus only on what unites us with the Pharisees. Unfortunately, some things must be called out lest the blind mislead the blind and both fall into the pit. Truths have consequences, especially the most controverted ones.

So, there are serious implications that arise from this, the first and the easier of the problems with the Pharisees. One is that the pious are wasting their time and the Lord’s if they are just superficially pious. God has no interest in our deceiving ourselves; He is unimpressed by pedantry and appearances. Those who unconsciously consider themselves just because their external actions conform superficially to the rules have not even begun to open themselves up to the work that God wishes to accomplish in them. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, says St Paul. What is required here is not greater effort towards superficial perfection, but rather a greater, a finer contrition, a heart that has learned to break itself over even its smallest faults, because in the end, God calls us not merely to perfection so much as to the depths of union with Him; that we might be One with Him in the eternal communion of the Blessed Trinity. As we noted the other day, the ethics of Christianity are important, fundamental, but it is the ethos, the spirit, which runs to the very depths. That is why there is hope for the undeserving workers of the eleventh hour, and why not even the apparently meritorious workers of the first hour may presume on their superiority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Speaking of superiority, let us come finally to the second of the problems I mentioned above, for the Pharisees are blind in both eyes. Here, Jesus’ words may be the cause of some anxiety:

Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

While some see this verse as referring to the idea of a fixed predestination, others see the plant metaphor as a reference to those man-made doctrines that Jesus had just denounced – those growths on the Jewish religion that had nothing to do with the Law of God. Yet we may go in a slightly different direction. One lesson this line contains is the reminder that, as every gardener knows, not all those things that look like plants are indeed plants. The devil is the ludicrous ape of God but best appears as an angel of light, and his kingdom is a kingdom of imposture and deceit.

 One of the fundamental mistakes of the Pharisees, therefore, is the vice of self-deception, the sin of being impostors to themselves but it is by no means restricted to them. We may think of this as a kind of blindness that produces hallucinations! To be humble is not only to restrain our burgeoning vanity; it is also to challenge the little lies we tell ourselves, those dear but misleading ego-facing fantasies that blossom and bloom like weeds in the blink of our imagination’s eye. If, as St Thomas teaches, humility moderates an appetite for excellence, it must block most concretely the workings of the inner movie screen on which the spectacle of our wonderfulness appears to us. Here, we are often torn between what we think of ourselves, and what we consider others might think of us. When I am vain, when my deepest question and need are how I appear to the world, then I am who I think you think I am. When I am humble, in contrast, when my deepest question is how I stand before God in all my real misery and my potential glory, then I am not who I think you think I am. I am who God knows me to be, but with this difference: that only when I come to know who God knows me to be can I become who God calls me to be – to know God’s dream for me.  

Then, even if I am blind, rather than following other blind guides, I can sit beside the blind beggar Bartimaeus who is there on the dusty road in Jericho, crying out to the passing Lord: Son of David, have mercy on me!