Seeing is believing

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 23-30) allows us to hear four of Jesus’ most notable sayings: first, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; second, that with God all things are possible; third, that all those who have left houses, brothers, sisters, etc for His name’s sake would receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life; and fourth, that many who are first will be last, and the last first.

These conversations must have come back to St Matthew while pondering on his many memories of the Lord. Maybe he discussed them with other disciples. Jesus probably said these things and similar ones many times in many circumstances. For us He dwells in His words, but for those who had actually met Him, He must also have dwelt in these memories, vivid in their mind’s eyes, His accent and the timbre of His voice sounding again on their inner ears. The disciples who slowly learned to live the Sacred Mysteries of the liturgy, founded on the ritual and Scriptural disciplines of their Jewish origins, first lived that Sacred Mystery of His presence on earth, and then lived and relived it how many thousands of times in their memories and minds. We have the following testimony from another evangelist, St John, in the first of his epistles:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

St John is so overwhelmed with His recollection of Jesus and wants to get across to his readers that wonderous thing: that the eternal mystery of the Son living in the Father had dwelt for a time among them, and they had seen and looked upon Him, and touched Him, and now recalled Him in their preaching continually. How true of both St Matthew and St John must be these words from Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

[…]

 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

    and on His law he meditates day and night.

But we might change these words a little and say now:

But His delight is in the mysteries of the Lord,

    and on His mysteries he meditates day and night.

For in the Old Testament, God appeared to Moses, and Moses spent forty days and nights with Him before returning from Mount Sinai with the Law of the Decalogue. Whereas in the New Testament, God Himself walked among us and taught us, before seeming to desert Himself on Mount Calvary, and then, on the third day, returned not from a mountain but from the abyss of death with the Pascal Mystery of Life written not onto stone but into His resurrected flesh. The Law remains but now He is Flesh and Blood.

So, what has all this got to do with the sayings of Jesus today in the gospel? Only that we cannot read these passages like so many sayings and dictums of a sage, or of another wiseman, or another parallel repository of wisdom like the Dharma of Buddha, the Hindus’ Bhagavat Gita, the sayings of Confucius, or the Surahs of the Quran, as if all religions were merely different paths that led to the same God. Jesus is not firstly an ethicist but a divine mystery for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. He is not primarily a book but a revelation:

the only Son of God, 
eternally begotten of the Father, 
God from God, Light from Light, 
true God from true God, 
begotten, not made, 
consubstantial, with the Father.

We do not approach Him by pedagogy, like we approach Maths and Physics and Ethics. We know Him rather by a mystagogy which we encounter in the Sacred Liturgy, primarily the Eucharist, source and summit of the Church’s life, and then in the Sacred Scriptures, not as some separate path or province of sayings and doings, but as a reality somehow conjoined to the Mysteries of the Incarnate Lord; a mystery in itself, inspired but not dictated by the Holy Spirit; the work of human hands and yet divine in its origin and in its effects. For with God nothing is impossible.

To be the rich man condemned in the words of today’s Gospel extract is to be so besotted with the things of this world that we miss the reality of these mysteries. Moreover, to break the bread of Scripture together is to receive already some of that hundredfold that He promised His faithful ones. And to receive His Word and His very self, leaving all else behind, is to overturn the human ordering of our material world where power pushes in for first prize, and the anawim, the little lovers of His great Mysteries, often find themselves pushed out, strangers to their neighbours for the truth has made them strange.

And yet, it still remains that we are called to serve the Sacred Mysteries even in the contorted and impatient faces of the enemy who rail against His teachings, not daring ourselves to grab onto the advantages of a false peace with this world, not raising our hand against its servants (for His kingdom is not of this world), but loving them as the Divine Master loved them, for where the Masters is, there must the disciples follow.

For in the end, the last who is made first is the Divine Master who in the mystery of His incarnation became

despised and rejected by men;
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

And this is the mystery which, in the end, St Matthew related in the pages of his gospel: not a teacher of ethics, or a strange oriental prophet, but the promised Messiah, unrecognisable except to those who had broken together that fragment of the Book of Isaiah and lived with it – lived with its mystery - in their hearts. And when we now break apart these fragments of the gospel, we hope by the power of His Holy Spirit to see into

the mystery which we have heard in our inner ear, which we have seen with the eyes of our minds, which we have looked upon in our imaginations and touched with our hearts’ aspirations.

Thus is His life made manifest, and we see it, and must testify to it.