Storytime

 An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Luke 12: 54-59) is a reminder that even if Jesus is a mystery to us, we are no mystery to Him. When He comments on the people’s knowledge of the weather, and when asks He why the people cannot read the signs of the times, it is not because He does not know what moves them. And when He draws the second scenario of this gospel about having to go to court and being in danger of ending up in a debtors’ prison, He was not telling the people anything they did not know; rather He was telling them things they knew very well but did not like to think about. In this regard, these hypocrites in the gospel are once again ourselves.

How was it that people knew what the weather was going to be: whether it would be hot or whether it would rain? There was no weather service in the Roman Empire. They probably knew the future weather in the format of stories. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. In its purpose, this saying is a weather forecast, but if we look at its structure or genre, it is a story. There are highs and there are lows. There is a hero – the shepherd. There is emotion; deep emotions of alarm or pleasure. Above all, this story helps people make sense of their immediate surroundings, and it tells people what to do in the short term, assuming of course that they already have a long-term plan. With this story of the coming weather, the people travel into tomorrow’s future; they may even take action now to shape that future, depending of course on the weather. Alongside all the models of humanity that anthropology has proposed, such as homo sapiens and homo faber (man the maker), we also find homo narrans - man the storyteller.

So, what is Jesus getting at in the first part of this gospel if not simply that we are rather good at telling ourselves one kind of story (the one that plays to our self-interest) but not so good at telling ourselves other kinds of story that are, shall we say, not so self-serving, the very stories that He Himself came to tell us? We are good at telling ourselves the stories that tickle our ambitions and needs or perhaps indulge our self-hatreds; those stories that lie in embryonic form in our imaginations and grow and shrink like a wicked genie. We are not as good, perhaps, at telling ourselves the stories that we need to hear: the stories of our fall, of our redemption, and of the long road home that we often seem so irresolute about. Why is it that we are wearied by the story’s development, or is it that we fear what the story will cost us next? 

In truth, audiences choose their stories. We characterise the cultures that we come across by the stories that they tell themselves. The people Jesus preached to liked stories about the weather, for many of them were farmers and this was an agricultural society. At least theirs were stories of education; our stories today are often stories of titillation. Today’s tales are plastered across the pages of the media or more usually on our screens, and they are rarely of the edifying kind. In that sense, maybe we read The Times or the New York Times but do we have any more sense of the signs of the times that the original peasantry of ancient Israel?

The people in this gospel extract do not know the signs of the times because they decline to listen to the stories that could unfold for them the signs of the times. Like us, they tell themselves stories of diversion or anguish about the things that they desire or the things that they fear to lose, and all the while they ignore the stories that would interpret for them their true reality and the dangers in which they really stand.

For this is the essence of Jesus' complaint. The people are not anxious about eternity; they are more stirred by a story about a potential law case than they are by the prospect of the courtroom of the last judgement. But, as we noted above, people choose their stories. They would indeed listen to these stories about the last judgement if their hearts were in the right place; if in fact their hearts were seeking God. Of course they liked stories about their own piety; flattering stories to give them reassurance about what fine fellows they were. We do the same. Yet these stories did not cut very deep…unlike the story of Scripture which St Paul describes in the following way:

For the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

This is the story of the word of God and it is a tale of high emotion too; of a hero, Jesus, who comes to our rescue, and of the drama that plays out for our salvation. This is the story that gives us the signs of the times, the story that tells of our peril, and of the destiny which cuts through every living and waking moment. More especially, for each one of us, this is the story in which, like Mary, we have the choice of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Lord. 

The only story left to tell, therefore, is what we are going to do about it right now.

A fear that is not fear

Your blogger is fighting an autumnal virus so please excuse the croaky voice! An audio version of the gospel and reflection from 16 October is available here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 12: 1-7) sees Jesus surrounded by a crowd of thousands but, as if dramatizing what He is about to say, He speaks His warnings only to His disciples: Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. There is a sense in which these words are not only a commentary on the Pharisees’ sneaky behaviour – their love of being seen to be good while they short changed justice behind the scenes – but also an insight into the true significance of human moral choice. This choice is not a private and autonomous affair, like our taste in socks, but a public engagement in, or refusal of, our call to the path of goodness. Along that path, Jesus then gives us two commandments which appear on the surface to contradict each other: on the one hand, fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell, and on the other, Fear not: you are of more value than many sparrows. What does He mean, this Teacher of all Teachers, by being so apparently self-contradictory?

This last passage begins with a third commandment which casts its own light on the contradictory injunctions about fear: do not fear, says the Lord, those who kill the body. And yet it is they who we do fear most: a fear inbred or learned through experience, or perhaps a fear gone autonomic, embedding itself in the overworked amygdala of an age of anxiety. How we fear those who kill the body! As a society, though hopefully not as individuals, we fear the Jihadi terrorists who plant bombs that tear their victims limb from limb, more than we seem to fear the cultural terrorists who dissolve all dignity, purity and decorum in a stew of normalised, popular erotica.

Nevertheless, Jesus’ injunction is not to fear the destruction of the body but to go against our habits, our sense of safety. How could He not be conscious of what this challenge asks of us, He who sweated blood in the garden at His own approaching sufferings? To our shame, not only do we fear those who kill the body; we fear those who hurt the body; we even fear those who threaten to hurt the body of our oversized sensitivities and who slight and frustrate our sense of how things should be. Is it any wonder He needs to train us through deprivation of the things we cling to, He who has urged us to leave all things and follow Him? Perhaps the body is, therefore, a metaphor for all those things we have wrongly learned to hold even unconsciously dearer than Him. When we do not fear those who kill the body, we will have arrived at a perfect freedom, for we will then be prepared to see all those things that we normally cling to unconsciously stripped from our possession, like skin flayed off a prisoner’s back. It is human to wince; but our Christian call is to let go, to let it happen, to let ourselves be stripped of our outer garments and attachments and even comforts as we follow Him to the cross.

So, how does all this illuminate the two injunctions to fear and to fear not? In the first case, the injunction to be afraid is not a command to fear cravenly, but to recall the fear of the Lord as a necessary element in our relationship of creatures to Creator. This is not to fear He will do us harm, but rather a recognition of the gulf that separates us from Him in purely existential terms: I am He who is, you are she who is not, as St Catherine of Sienna was told. Jesus was not being mean when He said this; He was allowing Catherine to be formed by the reality of who He was and who she was. Only in the light of that just fear could she or any of us truly have some inkling of the meaning of the Incarnation where the Almighty pours out His dignity, takes flesh, and walks among us.

In this regard, all our faith is about paradoxical balances: God is three and one, the Eucharist is sacrifice and sacrament, Mary is Virgin and Mother. So, the fear of the Lord, one of the seven privileged gifts of the Holy Spirit, a fear that speaks of reverence, humility and worship paid to the Almighty, complements even the most passionate and complete love of God through the virtue of charity, the theological gift par excellence. Fear is the gift that leads to docibilitas and docility: docibilitas, the teachable frame of mind that opens us to the lessons He is constantly teaching us; and docility through which we say our fiat upon hearing His voice. In this case, we should speak of a filial fear, a fear not of the waywardness of divine power but of its excellence, an eternal and everlasting excellence in all things from justice to love.

And here, with this evocation of love, is found the pivot point between today’s apparently contradictory commandments. While the command to fear bids us attend to God’s immense dignity as judge – the one who has the authority to cast into hell – the second command to fear not bids us attend to the loving condescension of the Father who visits His people from on high, who knows us to our very most intimate fibre, and to whom we matter more than we can ever understand. For God so loved the world.

Fear, therefore, and fear not; walk in reverence, therefore, but with passionate step; be humble, therefore, but reach up and touch the hand of the Father who only thinks thoughts of peace and not of affliction. In this fear-that-is-not-fear lies humility, the romantic soundtrack of our loving union with Him.  

Digging for gold

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11:37-41) sees Jesus dining with a Pharisee whose heart is full of judgement on his neighbour. Jesus, the reader of souls, does not let the challenge pass but piles up criticism upon criticism in return: this Pharisee is greedy, wicked and foolish. Then, comes the lesson of the giver of the New Law: give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

Like so many of these brief vignettes given to us by the gospel writers, there is a world of movement and consequence in these few lines. The Pharisees were the religious purists of the day, the most accomplished in their observances, at least outwardly speaking. But already, here we can discern a lesson of the gospel that provides the most practical of workaday truths: that things or rather people are rarely what they claim to be about. Why should that be? We humans are not singular in heart; rather, we are laminated instead. If one could take a cross section of our souls, the horizontal seams would expose complex layers, the paths in which our personalities have been laid down over the years by many experiences; by the formation of our educators and the unwitting deformation of others. We like to think that we know what drives us, but even the Psalmist prays to be cleansed of his secret sins. So too should we.

Worse still, we struggle to recognise this in ourselves, believing or thanking God in this age of individualism that we are not like other men. And yet we are, man being the imitative biped par excellence. The difference between the Pharisee and us is twofold, at least if we are not Pharisees: first, he has learned to master his exterior actions, and second, his ideology has shifted the burden of the law onto externalist conformity with minutiae, culminating in a confirmation bias of his own design and making. I thank you Lord that I am not like this publican. The Pharisees thus set and mark their own homework. No wonder this Pharisee ends up at the top of the class, at least in the inner movie of his own self-regard. We may ourselves sneer at the Pharisee, but who among us is not complacent in some way, as if God’s assessment of us should corroborate our own secret and oh-so-swift self-congratulation?

The Pharisee would probably have deeply resented being called to order by one whose claims included the power to dismantle the public status of Pharisaic legalism. Notice the nature of the accusations that Jesus makes: none of them can be judged from the exterior. Humans may be greedy and wicked in their heads and still appear generous and good to the world. Humans may pose as wise and sagacious and yet be full of foolishness. The Pharisees had so focused on the exterior that their inner compass was awry. Now came the Pharisees’ nemesis, and all the more powerfully as they must have felt the acuteness of His judgement on them. Did he run from the light, this Pharisee, as we often do? Or was he prepared to take a risk and look into the mirror that the Lord had held up to his soul?

Jesus does two things in the conclusion of this extract. First, he makes the Pharisee feel the weight of his judgement. Imagine sitting down to eat with a guest who has just labelled you ‘greedy’, ‘wicked’ and foolish. Yet, second, Jesus offers the Pharisee a route out of his vices, and it is not necessarily the one the Pharisee was expecting: Make alms of those things that are within. Here the Light of Life invites us to share our inner light; the lover of souls asks us to pour ourselves out in affection and service for others; the bearer of truth commands us not to hide our light under a bushel but dare to brave the darkness in the heart of our neighbour.  Make alms of those things that are within.

And in this, we are only following Him who made alms of all those things in His own heart. The entire gospel is indeed in a sense the alms of the beneficent generosity of the heart of our God, revealed in the incarnate Son who has visited His people from on high.  

For Jesus to contradict the Pharisee, therefore, is not just for Him to dismantle the corroding influence of the hypocrite. It is to reestablish the true form of all goodness which lies not in the human comfort blanket of skin-deep conformism but in allowing the all-powerful God to dig through the seams of our souls, and to craft out of the raw material He finds deep down in us the very likeness of His blessed Son.

From darkness to light

An audio recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 13: 47-52) contains a lesson that may chill us but one which we must listen to. Jesus sets out a parable about fishermen sorting fish, and then interprets it for the crowd, applying the sorting to the Last Judgement and the sifting of the good from the wicked.  

 We do not like to think about the risks to our salvation. Yet the parable that Jesus tells clearly indicates that final judgement is a feature, indeed the penultimate feature, on the landscape of humanity. There are many mysteries that lie ahead for those whom the fishermen collect in the basket. May we be among this number. For those that the fishermen throw away, however, one truth is crystal clear even now: that it is possible to lose God, and that if we lose God, we will pay the price.

 Perhaps there was a time when Christians dwelt rather too much on damnation, although like so many myths in the popular imagination, I suspect that the stereotype of hellfire preaching has often been prone to exaggeration. Nevertheless, what the prospect or possibility of heaven or hell both have in common is that they show to what degree our actions have a real importance and real-world consequences. According to the parable – Jesus’ parable, not mine – it is possible for our existence to conclude with, I might almost say evolve into, the tragedy of damnation. Our existence is not just like having a life in a video game which we can unplug and walk away from, or which we can renew by pushing another coin into the machine or switching it off and on again. Naturally, it reassures us to dwell on God’s mercy, but we must not take God for a fool. It is comforting to say that God loves us unconditionally but there are certain things He simply does not accept. Happily, we live now in the hour of His mercy which is never more than a prayer away from us but which comes with this double paradox: that we must lose our lives to save ourselves, or else we keep our lives but lose ourselves and lose God.

The fundamental reason for His refusal to accept certain things is that disorder and wickedness are real and yet not real. So too, we can add, is the universal human instinct to lie and deceive the self about the wickedness one has wrought. Why is this a real thing? Because God respects our free will. Our liberty is a real power. And yet it is not real; for its fruits can be an attempt to uncrown the Lord of all, a sin we cannot commit without undoing the very logic of our existence which is called to the Divine Beauty like a body following the space-time continuum. Every sin is a rebellious act of violence against the kingdom, and every attempt to disguise that rebellion is a myth. 

In contrast, Jesus' forgiveness brings not only pardon but enlightenment - enlightenment about God but also about ourselves. Jesus does not treat the sinner like a leper but neither does He behave towards them like a sugar daddy, or like a well-meaning, holy social worker, or indeed a shop assistant catering to sir’s or madam’s requirements. God is not a subcontractor to our self-esteem; the one who is necessary makes us unnecessary ones so close to His heart that He describes Himself as our lover with full rights to be jealous of our love. The embrace of this Saviour means we will have to let go of everything we have wrongfully laid our hands on. We must, therefore, be like Zacchaeus, come down from our tree, and make restoration for the wrong we have done. We cannot stay in the tree simply for the view or perhaps because we identify as a 'tree person', or because God only made trees for us to climb. There is work to do; there is a responsibility that surpasses our immediate view of the world. We must climb down from the tree that undid us in the garden.

Moreover, if He came to die to save us from sin, it is not only because He wants to invite us into the extraordinary mystery of His friendship. It is also because sin is a real, fundamental, and profound problem in our lives, no matter how much we dress it up with our self-deceit and our self-indulgence, and no matter how fruitless and unproductive of the real sin can be. Our ignorance diminishes our guilt – Father, forgive them - but it does not save us from the disorder that arises from living as if God's plans did not matter.

There are, therefore, some things in our lives that - with God’s help and grace - we must exclude, for fear that in choosing them over God, we too could become part of the catch that the fisherman can find no use for.

Are we who aspire to be good, therefore, no more than dead fish, even if we are a good catch? Perhaps there lies the sense of the last enigmatic remark of Jesus today:

Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

We are not meant to be like dead fish: there, the parable breaks down. We are meant rather to be fruitful. Our hearts are meant to multiply love and share its effects wherever we are in our lives, witnessing to the ancient truths that cast their light on history’s newest every day; illuminating them, exposing the things that hide in the dark, or bringing into the light new-born beauty and claiming it for the gospel.

 

From the archives: Martha's mistake

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 38-42) offers us the famous scene in which we learn practically nothing of the teaching Jesus delivered! Instead, we hear the story of a harried woman run off her feet, feeling like she is the butt of everyone’s whims and like she has been let down by her supposedly lazy sibling. We do hear one lesson from the Lord, however: that Mary, Martha’s sibling, has chosen the better part and will not have it taken from her.

We know Martha learned deeply from this experience. We know this for when later came the grief of her brother’s death, it was she who had the composure to talk to Jesus first of all. She had seen by then the one thing necessary: the call to be in the presence of the Lord with all that that implied.

Martha was so hurried and so busy in her own house. But the question is: what was she seeking? Ostensibly, she sought the comfort and the refreshment of her guests. Martha was perhaps what some people call a “feeder”, one whose love language could be expressed in the care and the craft of the kitchen and in the triumphantly flourished plate of culinary dainties. But there was only one thing necessary.

Martha was so intent on this agenda of her own creation that it led her into mindreading. How do we know? Listen again carefully to the words she addresses to Jesus:

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?

Lord, do you not care? Thus do we all try to mindread the Mind of the Eternal One. It is not just that Mary is not helping; it is not even that Jesus has not yet spoken to correct Mary’s misbehaviour. Martha has gone one step further and read into Jesus’ failure to act an indifference that piques her annoyance. Lord, do you not care…?

Martha’s first sin may have been vanity in seeking the approval of her guests, or it may even have been resentment at judging her sister’s inaction. But where does it lead if not to the hopeless, the futile, the sterile attempt to squeeze the living God into the space and scope of her own desires and expectations? Lord, do you not care…? Martha, Jesus might have replied, do you not think?

Yet Jesus answers this question not by contradicting her assumption but by holding up a mirror to her soul: by showing her that what lay behind her actions was not care but carelessness. We have come to think of anxiety only as a psychological condition; but here we see that it may also have a moral root in a lack of purity of intention, an almost wilful lack of peace, in a failure to encounter the burdens of the day in a spirit of service: not where can I do good but where do I best please the Lord? There is all the difference here between the ethics of Christianity and its ethos. It is not really possible to do good (small g) unless in doing so we are seeking the Good (capital G); every other action falls in some way short of our calling.

Yet, Martha is not attentive to these things, for her own drives have gone unexamined. She has not learned to question her apparent diligence; her pride will not permit it. She has not learned to take a step back and remember that, whatever the day brings, God has a plan; that God plants an angel chorus at every turn of our day to cheer us on, if only we will learn to open our hearts to their song of perpetual adoration to the glorious Trinity.

Martha was rebuking the Lord for failing to sink to her level, to shrink His expectations until they were as petty as hers, until they sought her satisfaction. In return, Jesus gently rebuked her for failing to rise to His expectations, for not reflecting His largesse, or for not seeking above all merely to please the Lord, her God. This is the one thing necessary, the upper room, the heights of Tabor, the crux of the Cross before Jerusalem, from which transcendent place we are called to cast our blind eyes upon the world and receive His sight: the grace to rest our eyes on the Heart of the One, and the grace to see all things and people as He sees them.

Martha dictated to Jesus: Tell her then to help me. How often we dictate to Jesus, sometimes in bold statements, and sometimes by passive-aggressive non-cooperation! And yet Jesus offers no counter command in this instant. Rather, He instructs her heart by pointing out the value of what Mary had done, the value of the path that Martha had not yet found.

It was not that Mary was lazy, although we can imagine that when this exchange was over, she offered to take her sister’s role while she, Martha, sat at the Lord’s feet herself:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

But there, in the final analysis, as Martha had to learn, is where all true action for God’s kingdom must begin and end: not in schemes and plans, not in busyness and not-enough-time-for-youism, not in initiatives and campaigns, not in mission statements, committee meetings, or any of the hideous metaphors that assault us with their pious idealisation of building an ecclesial paradise on earth; but in a quiet yet fierce loyalty to the one thing necessary, to that command of the Lord that whispers still through the olive groves of Gethsemane: watch and pray. For only out of that mighty stillness comes the triumphant assault of the Lord on the Cross and on the Tomb.