Where we find the Lord

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 1:29-39) shows us the organic rhythms that underpinned the life of Jesus and those that should underpin our own lives also. Jesus begins by visiting His friends, but His sociability very quickly turns into ministry, as He heals first Peter’s mother-in-law, then the sick from around the neighbourhood, and also delivers those possessed by demons. Then comes a moment of quiet which He creates for Himself, stepping away from the fray in search of recollection, before He is found by the disciples whom He exhorts to join Him in preaching throughout Galilee.

We may begin our reflection with Jesus’ last comment: for this is what I came for. Jesus’ life is our model in a special way because He comes to do the will of the Father, as He told Nicodemus: For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. We may speak in a sense of Jesus’ vocation in this case, for what is the will of the Father but the call He gives to Jesus to fulfil His purposes? We speak in COLW of both the personal vocation and the vocation to a state in life, the former a call to be or reflect some particular beauty of God and the latter a call to fulfil some common purpose in the life of the Church. The personal vocation is what or who we are, while the vocation to a state in life is what we do. In Jesus, the being and doing converge: He comes to give God’s gifts but He in fact is the gift He gives; He comes to redeem us, but He is our redemption; He is the victim for sin and the priest that makes the offering. This then is what He came for: to assume the responsibilities of a Saviour while being by nature the salvation that He offers us. Like Jesus, what we do does not exhaust who we are, but unlike Jesus, we can fail to live up to what we are called to be and what we are called to do. In this sense, what we said on Sunday still pertains: we must allow ourselves to be emptied out of everything unworthy in us in order to be able to follow Him in both His redemptive death and His glorious resurrection.

Another crucial pattern of the Christian life is also inscribed in this gospel passage: the alternation between mission and contemplation. If even Jesus, who possessed the Beatific Vision in His soul, withdrew to a quiet place for prayer, we may not – must not – excuse ourselves from the solemn duty of consecrating time to God in prayer and recollection. In this gospel scene, Jesus undertakes all the healings and deliverances that are required of Him by the local populace, but the very next day He rose early while it was still dark and went out to a desolate place to pray. The location is significant, but it is not necessarily what we think of on the surface. The gospel describes it as a desolate place but that could mean two things. On the one hand, surely, this was a quiet corner where nobody else went – not an easy thing to find in a busy shoreside town like Capernaum. On the other hand, it is not enough simply to go somewhere quiet when we pray, for where, as St Augustine says, can I go where I will not find myself? The desolate place that Jesus seeks in this moment of prayer is that place in our hearts where we are alone with God; where all the noise and bustle of our overstretched, overbusy minds have been let go of, where the tugging at our heart of unregulated needs and desires has been left behind for a moment, and where we can simply be who we are before the Lord. It is perhaps even harder to find that place in us than it is to find an abandoned place in Capernaum.

This too is another dimension of the COLW charism: the call to contemplation before action, or, one might say, the call for action and contemplation to be like the systolic and diastolic rhythms of the heart: the drive of life outwards and forwards, followed by the withdrawal of our energies to renew themselves in the heart’s rest.

And there is one more beautiful lesson of this gospel: that when the disciples look for Jesus, they can only find Him in this moment where His heart is at rest before the Father, in that desolate place of communion where the Father and He could be united in a different way, breathing in their mutual life of the Spirit. This is where the disciples found the Lord and perhaps it is where we should look for Him also.

A passage through the Jordan to life

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3: 13-17) recounts the episode of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan at the hands of his cousin John the Baptist. How strange are the paths of the Lord! Behold John, six months the elder of Jesus, sent before Him to make straight His paths, whose sandals he was not fit to loose, now performing for His Lord the ritual of symbolic cleansing from sin. Why? Why, indeed, when it was the sinless Jesus, the sacrificial lamb born in Bethlehem, who had come to deliver the world from sin? John himself is stricken with the question to which Jesus answers gently:  it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness. In other words, this is the will of the Father whose ways are nothing but justice and peace. While the voice of the Father thundered from the sky (according to St Mark), the vision of the opening heavens and the dove appear to be a private experience of Jesus, undetected by the assembled crowd, for the gospel says he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. This is another kind of Epiphany of that mysterious province where the ineffable Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, the Son, is joined to His humanity in hypostatic or existential union – body, blood, soul, and divinity, to use the classic formula. But why was His baptism a matter of all righteousness, according to Jesus’ word?

There is some mysterious link here between the passage that Jesus must follow, the journey He must undertake, in advance of our passage, our journey, towards God. It is not just that redemption by Jesus is a transaction of ransom paid to recover us from the slavery of sin. It is that of course, seen from one perspective. But from another, that redemption, the means chosen by the wisdom of the Father, required a transformation of the Son. Not, of course, that the Son can be transformed; properly speaking, as God there can be no change in Him. But here is the mystery of the incarnation, that the eternal Word of God at some point rose in human history like a newborn Sun to illumine the world, the eternal glory of whom was, as it were, emptied out so as to allow His eternal light to dwell substantially in the physical flesh of an Iron Age Israelite. When He tells us again and again in the gospel that where the Master is, there must the disciple follow, He is not simply pointing out an ethical or ascetical path of moral reform, like some Greek or Roman moralist, but signalling the need for a deeper, inner transformation whereby, in our own way but like Him, we too must be emptied out, not of eternal glory but of our bitter shame and rebellion, of our waywardness, of our unrighteousness, cleansed of the malice of our will and of the milky cataract of self-delusion that forms again and again over our inner eye. This transformation is part and parcel of our mystical death and resurrection in Christ, achieved sacramentally in our baptism, but requiring of us a faithful living out of its meaning in order for its reality to take flesh in us and transform us too, to make us like Jesus rising from the waters of the Jordan.

These are high matters and hard to define and grasp, yet their implications for us are spectacular. And light comes, as it so often does, from the letters of St Paul, specially the second letter to the Corinthians, where Paul specifically associates transformation in Christ with the attainment of righteousness. I give you the last section of Chapter 5:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know Him no longer in that way. So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! … we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

He made Him to be sin, i.e. as He would appear symbolically in the figure of a brass serpent healing the Israelites of a poisonous serpent encountered in the desert; as He would appear emerging from the River Jordan, baptised by John; as He would appear also eating and drinking with sinners; as He would appear most acutely of course, hanging on the tree of the cross, crucified between two thieves and despised and mocked by the holy leaders of God’s chosen people.

Why does God require us to step beyond the appearances in order to attain to a vision of His truth? Why does He not simply reveal all, blast His enemies, and be done with it? His reasons may remain inscrutable for eternity but what if they are something like this: what if the journey He takes us on, following the Son in a self-emptying, is also about working in reverse, about detoxifying, the self-dependent, arrogant seizing of knowledge and enlightenment inscribed in our first parents’ rebellion? Now, we can no longer proceed exclusively by knowledge, for we have abused it. We cannot judge Jesus by our senses alone, by our untrammelled logic and human wisdom. From our disobedience before that first tree of knowledge when we thought it would make us like gods, God intends to draw us to Himself by a new tree of apparent folly which will make us like his Son.

From the moment of this second tree onwards, we must go by the way we do not know, resigning ourselves to an act of confidence in this apparent failure of a Saviour, humiliated by an act of capital punishment. That now is the righteousness of God, for God’s righteousness can no longer be committed to our unsteady minds and hands except when we are transformed in Christ. Literally, He must remake us in Christ in order for us to be welcomed back into His kingdom. This is a mystery but not one we can access without the emptying out that God requires from each and everyone of us.

Ultimately, this is a mystery captured most exquisitely in those words of St John of the Cross at the beginning of the Ascent of Mount Carmel:

To reach satisfaction in all

Desire its possession in nothing,

To come to the knowledge of all

Desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to possess all

Desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all

Desire to be nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not

You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not

You must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not

You must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not

You must go by a way in which you are not.

When you turn toward something

You cease to cast yourself upon the all,

For to go from the all to the all

You must possess it without wanting anything.

In this nakedness the spirit finds its rest,

for when it covets nothing

nothing raises it up and nothing weighs it down,

because it stands in the centre of its humility.

 

…in the centre of its humility, like Jesus rising from the Jordan.

 

 

From poverty to riches

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 2: 1-12) gives us the only narrative in the gospels of the extraordinary visit to Bethlehem of wise men from the east. At first, they alight in Jerusalem, inquiring logically at Herod’s court for the whereabouts of the promised child king of the Jews. Informed by the scribes that the king of the Jews is to be born in Bethlehem, Herod sends the wise men on to the town where they indeed discover the child with His mother Mary and fall down to adore Him with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they avoid Jerusalem on their return journey home.

In this gospel we have a model of two ways of engaging with God: the way of the rich and the way of the poor, although I do not mean this in a financial sense. Herod is the personification of the rich pursuer of God. He is rich but only according to his own self-deceit. First of all, he is inattentive to any spiritual signs; these, after all, have to be brought to his attention which is fixed most likely on the things of this earth. Herod hopes for nothing in life, for he lacks nothing, at least in his own eyes. Therefore, when the star is pointed out, it is not an occasion of wonder but of worry: what does it mean, what is its significance? These questions are not asked in a spirit of open, honest inquiry, but of fearful, grasping anxiety. He does not ask what he stands to gain by this heavenly mystery but what risk it poses to a life that is all too material.

But, you might ask, is it not a good thing that he asks the chief priests and scribes for an answer? Yes, and no. I am not a praying man, says the drunken George Bailey in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is precisely because of this failure that George cannot at first take in the lessons that he needs to learn. Herod likewise is not a praying man. Of course, he should ask the priests and scribes about the star and the king of the Jews, but he should first ask God; he should first turn his attention to the Most High. He should not consult the priests like soothsayers, but only as ministers of God, his Creator. It is possible to pursue knowledge only to conquer but that is not how God wishes us to be enlightened. Receiving the knowledge of the prophecies without first bowing in humility to God, Herod can only then bend that knowledge into a devious plot the design of which is only made apparent by the dream the wise men have in Bethlehem. Those, like Herod, who treat the pursuit of spiritual knowledge like a conquest, the outcome of some endeavour of untrammelled curiosity, are likely to abuse its fruits. Such was Herod’s intention, and we remembered its bloody outcome on the feast of the Holy Innocents.  

This then is how the rich pursue God: self-sufficiently, driven on by the conquest of curiosity, inevitably instrumentalizing the knowledge they seem to acquire for their own self-satisfaction.

The poor of the Lord, the anawim, must take another path, the path of the wise men. We saw His star when it rose and have come to worship Him, they say to Herod in words that tell us much about the differences between them and their royal interlocutor. They began by looking up, not to their own needs but to the wonder that God had placed in the heavens to be noticed. We do not know how they prayed, but the quest they set out on has as its final objective an act of worship to the One who was to come.

Not that their journey was an easy one. How high their hearts must have been when they reached Jerusalem and the royal court: the end of a long and wearisome journey in winter must have seemed in sight. And yet, they had to go on, their minds full of doubt after the secret questioning of Herod. How very like the searches of the poor ones of the Lord! For God does not intend for us to take the journey we envisage but the journey He knows we need, the one that is not only for our good but for the good of others also. Perhaps then the wise men needed to pass through Jerusalem, not only to see the corruption of the seat of Jewish power, but as a sign to the increasingly purblind scribes and keepers of the Scriptures that history was accelerating, that events were unfolding beyond their ken, and that the Lord of History had finally come, although not in the way they had anticipated.

On the wise men go to their final destination where they offered that act of worship they had longed to give and handed to the mother of the king of the Jews the gifts they had transported, doubtless with some anxiety. Opening their treasures, says St Matthew: normally, it is the recipient of a gift who opens it. In this scene, God had made Himself so helpless in His incarnate form that these poor ones were obliged to do this for Him, for God does not want those who seek Him merely to be passive but to be cooperators or, better still, communicants in this wonderful encounter. No doubt as they opened their gifts to Him, they found themselves immeasurably repaid for all their troubles…   

…troubles that were not yet ended. For those who have come closest to the Lord are not thereby spared trials; they undergo them in a different way. We, the disciples of the Lord, are called to follow His example, becoming figures of His life and suffering after the fact, but in the Christmas and Epiphany narratives, it is the participants who become figures of the life of Christ to come. Thus, just as the Holy Innocents shed their blood in advance of Jesus, in this gospel the wise men fled the country, foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family from the murderous intent of the tinsel-crowned power monger in Jerusalem. Blood will have blood, says Shakespeare’s homicidal tyrant Macbeth, and yet in the end, even these intentions are made to work against the kingdom of evil. The shedding of innocent blood thus betokens the arrival of a kingly conqueror whose priesthood will remake the earth with its suffering. The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are thus not only gifts but signs of Him who was to come.

Thus are the poor ones of the Lord made rich in a mystery hedged about with the significance of the Lord’s desires and His irresistible purposes.

I watch the sunrise

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 67-79) is a moment of prophetic insight and praise, as Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit and speaks words of glory, thanks, and foresight that Christians down the ages will daily repeat. Looking back to David and Abraham, he recalls all the promises of God to His people who delivers them from their enemies and redirects them along the paths of holiness. Lastly, he reflects on his son’s own destiny to be the prophet of the Lord who announces the tender mercy of God and starts the fire that will bring light to those in the shadow of death. These are words that tells us about ourselves but mostly about God.

About ourselves we prefer to believe anything but the truth, but in truth, we are a sorry lot if Zechariah’s prophecy is anything to go by. For, who are the enemies from whom God delivers us if not ourselves, our own worst enemies? We have been the agents of our own shipwreck, and it takes a Divine Redeemer to right the ship on our behalf. God’s redemption is offered so that we might serve Him in holiness and righteousness all the days of our lives for, by our own lights, we are likely to follow a path of injustice which is at best enlightened self-interest, and at worst, a careless disregard of the good of others and of ourselves. And it is indeed God’s tender mercy that we need for we sit in darkness and the shadow of death. For even when we are redeemed, we are entirely capable of preferring the gloom to the Lord’s illumination. We cannot stand too much reality, for we try to bear its weight with our own strength. The doorway into night is held open by our own hand.

A sombre picture? No, this is the fruit of Zechariah’s nine months of mute reflection. Gripped by the Lord’s imposed discipline, Zechariah emerges from his own grand silence to give expression to that least flattering of the truths of the faith: that God alone can save us. Ours is an existence of dependency. But Zechariah at the same time gives expression to that most beautiful of the truths of the faith: that God wishes to save us. And not only wishes to save us but, to that end, has done everything which stands within His power to do, short of removing our free will and dragging us home by force.

Instead of which, He has raised up for us a horn of salvation, He has sworn an oath of deliverance to Abraham, and - most personally to Zechariah - He has sent the prophet of the Most High to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins…

Ultimately that we serve Him without fear, as did Joseph who walked to Bethlehem beside a beast of burden carrying his heavily pregnant spouse, who fled the violence of a tyrant king to save mother and child, and lived a while in Egypt from where he would emulate the great Joseph of Egypt and lead this flower of God’s new people back home to the promised land.

The tracks of that path from Egypt back to Israel, from bondage back to freedom, are the way of peace that Zechariah prophesies here. This path will eventually be the way made straight by the voice of John the Baptist, the royal road of the cross hallowed by the Lord’s bloody footsteps, and the only option for the disciples who would follow their Master.

We need not travel all that distance tonight, however. It only remains for us to hear the words of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven to the sinner:

Rise, clasp my hand, and come!

Come out of the shadow of death, out of the darkness of sin, to take our place beside Zechariah, Joseph, and John the Baptist, and cast our eyes on the grace-filled sunrise which begins now in the crooked crib of a newborn babe.

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The blog is now in recess until 6th January.

Fearlessly walking with God

A recoding of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 18-24) relates the circumstances in which Joseph considered “putting Mary away” when he discovered she was with child. His motives are made at least partially clear: he was a just man and unwilling to put her to shame. Then, we hear the first of Joseph’s dreams in the gospel that guides his steps when no human counsel can help him: do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. The gospel ends with this simple remark, underlining Joseph’s obedience to God: when Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

We may reflect on this last fact first: when Joseph obeyed the command of the angel in his dream, he was following a long tradition of obedience to God’s messengers. He could not, like Mary, reverse the disobedience of our first parents by his simple consent to God’s plan. That was Mary’s privilege: to offer her fiat, being perfectly attuned to the desire of the Blessed Trinity. Joseph in contrast needed to do something in order to offer his fiat; he needed to take action. He was a child of disobedience, as we all are, but the angel’s command was a decisive moment in which he could walk with God in a new and deeper way. And so, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, as Abraham did when he stayed his hand and did not take Isaac’s life, as Gideon did when he went to offer sacrifice, and – perhaps most significantly - as Manoah did when he heard the angelic guidance to consecrate his son Samson to the Lord. Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it, Joseph’s son will later say when a woman in the crowd acclaims his own Mother who bore him and suckled him. But Jesus’ answer – blessed are they – is a celebration not only of Mary but of Joseph also. Blessed is Joseph too who also heard the word of God, communicated through an angel, and kept it.

The other mystery in this gospel concerns Joseph’s intention to send Mary away. One reading of this episode sees Joseph as an agent of mercy, a man deeply disappointed in his imperfect bride but unwilling to expose her to the stoning that she risked as an adulterous woman. If such an interpretation honours Joseph for his mercy, it dishonours him by making him guilty of humanly rash judgement. Personally, I prefer another interpretation: that Joseph knew Mary’s greatness so well, understood and perceived her holiness so acutely, that he could only think of withdrawing himself from her when he saw signs of her miraculous pregnancy – for surely such a phenomenon was no sign of her having fallen but of the realisation of Isaiah’s prophecy, as St Matthew points out. The words of the angel then make more direct sense: do not fear to take Mary as your wife. Here, Joseph also joins another venerable Old Testament tradition, like St Peter when he says: depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. Like Moses hiding his face before the burning bush, like Isaiah realising his sinfulness after his vision of the King of Hosts, or indeed like Manoah who declares to his wife:  We shall surely die because we have seen God.

In this way, Joseph and Mary are then the first human beings to help to begin dismantling the great taboo that is built around the presence of God in the temple, which protected the sacredness and holiness of God precisely through excluding the human presence. After all the High Priest could only enter the Holy of Holies once a year. Now, Joseph and Mary are called not only to face God but to have God live with them familiarly, to hold His incarnate self in their arms, to see and hear his human voice, to witness His self-emptying in pursuit of the reconciliation of his people. All these things Joseph witnessed and only because he took courage and obeyed the command of the angel…

… which anticipated the constant command of Jesus throughout the gospel. Joseph and Mary – both of whom are told not to fear – stand, therefore, at the beginning of a new tradition of those who must show courage in the presence of the Lord: the apostles in the storm-tossed boat, Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration, the women who greet Jesus after the resurrection. God is still the thrice holy God of Isaiah’s vision before whom the Seraphim sing, but now He is also God with us, Emmanuel, who lies in the arms of a human mother and father, who submits to an education and apprenticeship in ancient Palestine, whose physical appearance, manners and ticks must have recalled his wider family and older human relatives, merely a man of this earth who was, moreover, only the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, born of the Father before all ages.

All of this mystery is found in Joseph’s humility before Mary’s pregnancy. Like Elizabeth, Joseph might have said: who am I that the mother of my Saviour should come to me? But who is any one of us? And that is the point. It is not that we pleased God and then He decided to come to us. Our action is part of a bigger story in which, as St John tells us, God loved us first, loved us despite our disobedience, loved the unlovely that they might lovely be, loved us so much that, as with our first parents, He sought to walk beside us in the afternoon air, beginning in the garden of Mary and Joseph. 

Those who lie in unvisited tombs

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 1-17) recounts the genealogy of Jesus, going back to David and eventually to Abraham. A whole procession of names, most of them unknown to us, pass us by, as we await the coming of the Saviour. What spiritual sense can we make of this passage which seems so alien to us? What was its meaning to the first Christian readers? Surely, we do not need to know every one of the forty-two generations reaching back to Abraham, do we? And what can they possibly have meant to Jesus who actually derives no physical descendance from Joseph but only from His mother?

The first paradox of this gospel can be found in dealing with this last question. For why was Jesus sent to us in the first place? To save us from sin? That but not only that. For in saving us from sin, the Father determined that He should adopt us through His only begotten Son. This is the mystery of our adoption in Christ which St Paul will unfold in the letters to the Romans and the Ephesians. And with the opening of St Matthew’s gospel, we can say something more about it: that in order to adopt us and make known to us His divine paternity, the Eternal Father willed first that His only begotten Son be adopted by a human father and know the joys of being a real human son – the son of Mary but of Joseph also by adoption.  

Of course, in Joseph’s own genealogy, there are some very recognisable names: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David among them.  But here we find some beginning of a deeper mystery. Each of these men were individuals in themselves with stories and experiences of their own, private thoughts and feelings locked away in their own hearts, not listed in some public record. Yet, in another sense, they serve to point the way forward to Christ, the Saviour to come, the hope of every human breast touched by grace that longs and longs and does not know why. Abraham and Isaac between them played out the drama of the persons of the Father and the Son, Abraham willing to countenance the sacrifice of his child, Isaac bearing the weight of the wood on his shoulders. Jacob’s struggles anticipated those of Jesus, as does his vision of the bridge between heaven and earth which is realised in his divine descendent. David and Zadok between them speak to us of Jesus’ kingship and His priesthood, although the Zadok in this genealogy is only named after the great high priest of Solomon. David’s passionate love of God was poured out in the song of Jesus’ heart, and Zadok’s devotion to the holiness of God was expressed in Jesus’ zeal for His Father’s house. Jesus does not merely appear, therefore, at the end of this genealogy. Instead, He is present throughout it, His actions foreshadowed in those of his ancestors.

Neither are these the only ways that Jesus’ genealogy may speak to us. Jesus is God and man; His destiny was to bestride the world as its conqueror and live among us as our brother. And so, we can regard every one of these other names, especially the unknown ones, as types not of Jesus but of us, the anawim, the very ordinary ones, the ones that are seen and forgotten who, like George Eliot’s heroine Dorothea Brooke, live faithfully a hidden life and lie in unvisited tombs. They lived in hope and so must we; they lived often in ignorance of God’s purposes, and so do we. They did not know when their waiting would end, and neither do we. They were probably perturbed by the many troubles of the children of God, and so are we, scandalised in our leaders, disappointed in those we trust, wearied by others, and wearied by ourselves. Yet all we can do is to cling on to Jesus, our alpha and omega. Like them, therefore, we are participants in that grand tradition described by St Paul in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews:

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings… By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God… By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. … By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going… And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.

What is this except the tradition of faith, the faith that goes before us and comes after us, that we have received and that by God’s grace we must pass on, for there are, as Chesterton put it, no private suns and moons, i.e. there is no account of the universe that is simply for little me. We belong to a larger world. The Sun of Justice is the Son of the Father, and He will rule forever over His Father’s domain.

This grand genealogy, therefore, means something to us for two reasons: first, because it tells us about Jesus, and second, because it tells us about ourselves. It tells us about Jesus whose coming, ministry and destiny are foretold in the major figures whose names we have dwelt on already. It tells us about ourselves in the unknown names, the litany of the little ones forgotten or ignored by the world but who play a role in the passing on of that life which bears fruit in ways that are incalculable. Every hair on our heads is numbered, as we know, and the Father holds us in the palm of His hand and shapes us with the skill of a potter, if only we will allow it; if only we will suffer ourselves to be remade in the image of His Son.

And how they must have greeted their descendent when He opened for them the gates of their prison between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when a new light dawned upon their ignorance, and mercy and justice together breathed the possibility of life back into the moribund figure of broken humanity. This is our family tree, the fruit of divine promises and many hidden and unknown human fidelities, handed on down the ages, from father to son and mother to daughter, until the last syllable of recorded time.

 The genealogy of Jesus, so strange upon our ear, is, then, no excursion into mere curiosity or arcane trivia. It is the unfolding and making known of the tale of God’s mercies down the centuries, told out in the lives of the many most of whose names are known to God alone and who lie in unvisited tombs. 

Casting light in our darkness

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 2-11) shows us two contrasting scenes, both of which cast a light on our faith in the coming of Christ, our Saviour. In the first scene, the disciples of John the Baptist approach Jesus and ask Him, apparently at John’s behest, whether He was the One who was to come. John did not send them for his own satisfaction; he knew full well who was to come, had been familiar with His coming since his earliest infancy, and likewise must have known the dignity of his aunt whose visits were always a blessing beyond all hope in the house of John’s parents Elizabeth and Zachariah. Rather, John sent his disciples to Jesus to learn what they needed to know in order, finally, to abandon the path of the Baptist, and follow Jesus instead. In the second scene, which immediately follows, Jesus asks the crowds, who had gone to see John previously, what it was that they saw in him – a reed shaken by the wind, or a man clothed in soft garments? The possibilities are ironic and deliberately provocative. Answering His own question, Jesus concludes by revealing John’s real identity as the prophet of the Messiah.  Jesus affirms, again with an enigmatic paradox, that John was great but not as great as the least in the kingdom of heaven.

In this complex scene, what is it that the Lord seeks to teach us? We might say it is something about the complexity of vision and the need for faith before the approaching mysteries of His coming into the world. For in the first instance, John’s disciples are invited to look at the plain evidence: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, leapers are cleansed and the deaf hear. There were an increasing number of recipients of such miracles in the days of Jesus: those who had been once afflicted and now walked free of their burdens. This was tangible evidence of who Jesus was, not least because it was a fulfilment of prophecy, for these were the very signs the prophesied Messiah was meant to produce. Jesus came to build a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, but its fruits spilt over into the material world, and the healing from sin brought with it healing from the other disorders of this life. His invitation to John’s disciples, therefore, was for them to look and see; not to ignore the obvious; not to turn their eyes from the evidence on the basis that perhaps there was another explanation for what they saw. The challenge to them was to be simple, for it is perhaps one of the sins of the devout, as John’s disciples were, to be too complex, too involved in theological wrangling and minutiae. Their tendencies were those of the learned, and they needed this lesson of simple observation to set them free.

The lesson of the Lord to the crowds, however, is quite different. For the sin of the crowd, of the generally undevout, is not to be too complicated but to be too shallow; to be so immersed in this world that they cannot see beyond the surface level; to be so unreflective that they ricochet off the atmosphere of the mysteries before them. To the casual observer, driven on by no more than sensation-seeking curiosity, perhaps John appeared as a reed shaken by the wind, a wild and insubstantial thing; a creature of the desert, a holy mad man. John’s attraction for the shallow observer could have been the attraction that all curiosities hold for the vulgar crowd. So, Jesus shakes them with His question, and then He follows home with some of His often-searing irony:

What did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft garments? Behold those who wear soft garments are in kings’ houses.  

But what is going on here if not that Jesus is now wrong-footing them, passing from one extreme to the other? Any half decent teacher should immediately spot the tactic: show the shallow ones some obviously wrong answers, and they have a chance of alighting on the right one. And then the right one comes as the fulfilment of the prophecy:

Behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.

In citing these words of Malachi, Jesus is saying that John is the prophet, and, if not yet that He Himself is the Christ, at least that the Christ is among them. The people would have to join up the dots for themselves, especially those who had heard Jesus’ reply to John’s disciples.

Today’s gospel then offers us these contrasting lessons. John’s disciples must approach the mystery of His coming through simplicity. They have vision but it needs to become focused. The crowd in contrast must approach this mystery through coming alive to faith. They have their reason and their wits, but they need to be enriched.

There are lessons for ourselves in both regards. Those who are devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient humility; perhaps they are mislead into the shallows by believing their learning will be enough, as if Divine Revelation were a communication package and not an invitation to a divine communion. Those who are not devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient faith; they barely approach the waters of the divine mysteries, believing that worldly insight will be enough, as if in this life God were another system to game, like all the others.

And, so why, in Jesus’ concluding remarks, was the least in the kingdom of heaven greater than John? Here, Jesus leaves the crowd, and John’s disciples if they were still in earshot, with a paradox that again is an invitation. There they were, awaiting the coming of the Prince of Peace who was expected to sweep away the enemies of Israel, and here was the Messiah, now revealing Himself in an unexpected mystery of divine humility. Jesus is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven simply because He makes Himself the least, the servant of all, emptying out His dignity to walk among us, to eat with us, and even to lie in the filthy surroundings of a tumbledown dwelling among animals, like the poorest of the poor. For this is how He intends to break through our complexity and our shallowness, our pride and our self-sufficiency, and to cast some light into our darkness to reveal to us the eternal depths of the love of the Father who sent Him to save us and bring us home.  

He ain't heavy

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 28-30) is an extract from a longer address of the Lord in which He berates the towns of Israel who had heard His preaching and not repented. Woe unto them, is His searing message – no sweetening of the pill from the Lord of all sweetness. And then comes this gentle coda to the chapter, a word of kindness to His little ones: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. … For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

We are unsure of how to take these words that on their surface are so inviting. Is this how it is really, Lord, we wonder? Can it be this straightforward? It seems all the harder to believe Jesus in this instance because our own experience apparently contradicts His infallible word. After all, if being a disciple were that easy, why aren’t more of us saints? Why aren’t more of us simply just competent at bearing the yoke of the Lord? We remember His other injunction of course: if any man will be my disciple, he must deny himself, take us his cross and follow me… How are we to square this with the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden? We gaze at the sky and we wonder: does it all depend on what mood He is in? How is this so, Lord?

But what we fail to see or to appreciate is that it is not Jesus’ burden that is heavy; it is not His yoke that makes things such a struggle for us; rather, it is our own. Jesus says Follow me, and along we wish to go. But the trouble with us is that we want to bring all our stuff with us, mostly unconsciously although not always. Committing to Him in our grandiloquent prayers, we unconsciously bring our self-centredness with us, our latent assumptions about who are number 1 and number 2 around here (me and Jesus of course). We make our donations to the Lord, and then, in a perverse tribute to His advice, we do not let our righthand see that our lefthand is holding back from giving what it needs to give. Our supposed all is in the end only a fraction. In other words, deep down we give half-heartedly. We want to have our cake and eat it. We love without surrender, and we sacrifice only with calculation.

And thus, we feel the cross and the burdens are heavy. We know none of the lightness that possessed the soul of Jesus, even in His desolation on the Cross. Centred on ourselves, all the forces of the sinner’s gravity weigh on our shoulders; and thus, unwittingly, we are the cause of most of our grief. Our souls bathe not in a liquor of gratitude but in a stew of when will it endism? We feel we deserve better; we have not really considered what we are owed.

Human nature does not change down the ages. It is very much as the fourth-century St Augustine put it in his prayer for Holy Communion:

 

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

 

And, Augustine himself acknowledges in the prayer our inconstancy in resolution:

 

In time of correction we confess our wrongdoing: after Thy visitation we forget that we have wept.

If Thou stretchest forth Thy hand, we promise amendment; if Thou withholdest the sword, we keep not our promise.

 

How then, we wonder, can we know the lightness of His burden and the easiness of His yoke? Here we must surrender to the divine pedagogy, to the training that He offers us every day, making - like Mary our Model - our yes and thank you to Him and in every minute of every day. Deep down, His pedagogy enacts that one great command that Jesus issued to His fisherman followers: put out into the deep. Let go and surrender. In other words, believe the gospel, embrace the path and all that it means for us as individuals … with our own wounds and attachments.

Unless we are gifted by some special grace, this is not the work of one day or one night; it is not the work of one prayer or one retreat. How could we learn of Him – the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end – in so short a time? Through this slow discipleship, the reality of our becoming Him, conformed to His image, becoming an icon of the Father to others, can be seen in all its incarnational reality.

Only slowly do we set down our own burdens, shed our false selves, and become the dream that the Father had of us from all time. Only gradually will we know just how light and easy are the burdens of Christ. And then, and only then, please God, He will give us rest.

  

Making straight the way of the Lord

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3:1-12) shows us scenes from the ministry of St John the Baptist, the one who came to make straight the way of the Lord. Like a distant prophetic figure out of the Old Testament – in a sense, the last of the Old Testament prophets who all point forward to Christ – St John, the cousin of the Lord, calls the listening Israelites to repentance, urges them to do good, and to be mindful of the eternal consequences of their actions. In the most alarming metaphors, He predicts, moreover, the figure of the Christ who will baptise the people with the Holy Spirit and fire, and winnow the good from the evil in an eternal settlement of justice. There are many ways in which such a scene and such messages could be approached. Yet one theme that strikes the reader today is what we might see as St John the Baptist’s call to reality: his call to sinners to see the reality about themselves and the reality of the stakes of this life.

Who am I and, even, why am I not that other person? Hardly anybody ask themselves these things explicitly, but they are inquiries that underlie our earliest sense of self. The waters of the self soon become muddied through our engagement with sin, and then, our waywardness, the result of the wounds of original sin, becomes compounded by our growing inability to face the truth about the mistakes we have made. As Hilaire Belloc says in one bitingly satirical poem:

If you have luck you find in early youth

How dangerous it is to tell the Truth.

Especially, we might add, the truth about ourselves. St John the Baptist addresses the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but when he calls them a brood of vipers, he is speaking to us through them. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, he advises them, as he advises us all. But the mould and blight of self-deception lies in various thicknesses upon our otherwise fruitful actions. How well do we know ourselves? Better than we think, most likely, for otherwise, we would have no instinct for covering up our deceits, if not with outright lies, then with our reverse-engineered justifications, the false trails we lay for others to still believe in us. And when we do these things, we make ourselves the children of the Father of Lies whose writhing form is sometimes depicted beneath the feet of the Virgin Mother. When Moses made a serpent of brass and hung it on the crotch of a tree to cure the Israelites of the poisonous snake bites, his action symbolised that the Christ would look like any other viper or sinner, and yet He would bring not poison but a cure. We are not so evil as to be beyond redemption; there is a cure for us. But neither are we so good as to be able to free ourselves easily from the entanglements of self-deception, from our lack of realism. We must, as St Teresa of Avila tells us, eat the bread of self-knowledge with every meal. Knowing who we are is part of the road back towards God, for it was by a category error about ourselves – wishing to be as gods – that we left the path that He had fixed for us originally.

And if St John the Baptist calls us to be realists about ourselves, he also calls us back to reality over the consequences of our actions. As we reflected on in a recent post, time rises in our hearts like the crest of a mountain on either side of which lie the eternal destinies of the good and the wicked. We enjoy with our faculty of freedom the possibility of getting home but we incur the risk of getting lost on the way. And this freedom is meant for something. St John’s metaphors depict Jesus as a farmer who winnows his harvest in search of the good grain; we belong to the divine orchard and are destined to bear fruit or to be felled. In other words, ours is a qualified freedom; we are free for something. God did not make us free to invent our own selfish worlds but to share freely in His world of unquenchable goodness. There may have been a time when Catholics were taught too brutally about these eternal risks, like children of neurotic parents taught to live in a state of constant emotional trauma. But now we have run to the other extreme where God is either an indulgent Sugar Daddy, benignly satisfied with the gift of our distracted attention, or a cool bro who would never do anything so evil as to hold us to account. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire, promises the prophet of the Lord. When did we last hear that message? We are fools if we do not reflect on it from time to time, as the Exercises of St Ignatius urge us to.

These are the means by which St John tries to make the way straight for the Lord. If our ears are to be opened to the good news to come, we need self-knowledge; we need to shed the lies with which we comfort ourselves and face our worse selves only to bring them to the healing touch of Christ. He is an orchardist on the look out for unfruitful trees, but He is also the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep. He is not in the end a farming merchant or trader but a Father, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

And, likewise, if our hearts are to accept the call that He offers us and that we wish to attend to, we must reflect often on the eternal vistas that stretch away on either side of the crest of time upon which we walk: to the right, the everlasting hills of the divine country which bathe our hearts in the light of hope, and to the left, the unfathomable lake of fire, as seen in St John the Apostle’s vision.

As the great Fulton Sheen said, reflecting on the crosses of the criminals that stood either side of the innocent Christ: Let us not presume: one thief remained unrepentant. Let us not despair; one thief stole heaven. 

From signs to silence

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 16:15-20) gives us the last scene in the gospel of St Mark, setting out Jesus’ final command to the apostles to preach the gospel, and promising that their work would be accompanied by miracles and signs. Then the Lord is taken into heaven where, St Mark tells us, He sits at the right hand of God, while the apostles went out to preach the good news.  

The launch of the Church in the wake of Pentecost was, as someone has said, like the launch of some great rocket from Cape Canaveral, the noise and fire of the engines like the roar of the Holy Ghost into history; the power, the grace under pressure of the generations of martyrs to come and their often miraculous actions like the imposing profile of technological majesty, projecting itself into the sky in the sight of the whole world. St Mark’s gospel is the simplest and most straightforward of the gospel narratives, and yet it does not shy away in this final chapter from the power and immensity of the Redeemer of the human race.

For this is the first thing to note about such powers: that like all gifts, they are the fruit of the abundance of Christ. When Christ walked the earth, power flowed out of Him even at His merest touch. Bonum diffusivum est – goodness shares itself, the ancient Greek principle, was later adopted by St Thomas and the other scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, but it captures something of the overflowing nature of God’s loving kindness, of the God who makes the sun and rain to come on the evil as well as on the good, of the God who works the miracles of history, as well as the mysterious wonders that happen only in private.

Jesus’ charismatic gifts, however, His ability to work miracles and do astounding feats: these are something more, especially when they are gifted to mere mortals. Faith, hope, charity, and all the other gifts of God are essential to our sanctification. In contrast, miracles, locutions, visions, bilocation, or whatever extraordinary signs the apostles and other have worked: these are not for the sanctification of the individual but for the sanctification of others.

There is then this paradox of holy displacement according to which the signs which are most associated with the holiness of a person are in fact not the gifts that make them holy. This paradox is most exquisitely realised in the life of the Virgin Mary who, apart from a touch of prophecy at the time of the Magnificat, achieved no extraordinary signs or actions in her life. Yet later on, there she stands, queen of apostles, and queen of martyrs, the greatest of the witnesses of Christ, the ark of the new covenant and the new gate of heaven. Her miracles will come of course but not until she sits in glory beside her Son by the throne of the Almighty Father.  

So important are these charismatic gifts that, except for the category of martyr, the Church demands them as a sign from any individual to whom the faithful wish to attribute sainthood. And yet, is it not also true that some of the greatest saints, like Mary, follow a path of apparent obscurity, of a profound silence, without show, without demonstrable signs of wonder? This is surely true of the mightiest French saint of them all, St Therese of Lisieux, the obscure Normand Carmelite who died of tuberculosis at 24 in a country rent by extreme culture wars against the Church, and who ever since has inspired Catholics the world over and obtained so many miracles through her intercession. In the end, all the baptised, every single one of us, are called to become an image of Christ through whom we are adopted of the Father, yet we do this in our distinct ways. Some may indeed work miraculous signs, like Christ in the pomp of His ministry; others are reduced to weakness and helplessness, like Christ in His hidden life or in the moment of His terrible passion.

The question then is not whether we live up to the most spectacular embodiment of Christ, but whether we are faithfully listening to, and doggedly following, the vocation that the Lord issues to us, the path that is carved by the streams of grace in our soul, revealing that particular beauty of the Trinity that it is our calling to reflect. Follow me, Christ says; and wherever the Master goes, there must the disciple follow. Some will follow Him in His glory and astound the world, making manifest the power of the Lord; in contrast, others will follow Him as they follow the mute Lamb, the voiceless victim of sin, the silent Man of Sorrows despised. For as Fr Manley Hopkins wrote:

 

Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire).