Archived Homilies

Previous homilies from Fr Paul King.

 
33rd SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

  This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. Apparently, in the days leading up to last Friday, a record number of poppies has been sold. Despite being subject to drastic cuts, the armed forces are held in higher regard by the country at large than they have been for many years. The obvious reason for this, and it certainly is the main reason, is that for a number of years it has been kept before our eyes that to be a member of the armed forces is to risk your life. But I wonder if there is also a subsidiary reason, and one which relates, at least remotely, to the theme of today’s Scriptures.
 
In recent years we have shied away from the military imagery which used to surround Christian discipleship; these days the hymn ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’ isn’t often sung. However, if today’s Second Reading had been allowed to run on for a few more verses, we would have encountered items of military equipment – ‘let us put on faith and love for a breastplate, and the hope of salvation for a helmet’. As Christians we seek to follow the Prince of Peace; the Cross of Christ is the absolute antithesis of a weapon of violence; the victory of Christ is won not by force but through suffering. But nevertheless there is, however paradoxical it may sound, a Christian ‘warfare’.
 
As I have said, the current high regard for our armed forces is in large part due to their readiness to give their lives. But the other aspect of military life which commands respect is its discipline. I think it is true that, generally speaking, the military way of life stands today in much sharper contrast to civilian life than once it did. In civilian life there has been an increasing emphasis on informality. As far as possible, individual whims and passing feelings are given weight and value. While most of us are in principle encouraged as far as possible ‘to do our own thing’, in the armed services, everything depends on being an interdependent team; everything depends on keeping the central aim clearly in view. This aspect of service life also resonates with the life of the disciple of Jesus Christ. It is this aspect with which today’s readings resonate.
 
There is nothing remotely military about today’s First Reading, the touching description from the Book of Proverbs of ‘the perfect wife’. But it is a picture not of hectic activity, but of a balanced, disciplined and well-organised way of life. Everything about the many-sided activity of this wise woman is ordered to a clear end. It is ordered to the good of her household in its widest sense, including an openness to the needy and the stranger. And, as the First Reading always does, it picks up, or foreshadows, the parable in the Gospel, the so-called ‘parable of the talents’.
 
Picking up that parable, the ‘perfect wife’ fills out the most obvious interpretation of that parable. St Paul indicates elsewhere that there were those among the Thessalonian Christians who were simply sitting down and waiting idly for the Second Coming of the Lord. The ‘parable of the talents’ fits very neatly into that context. And it is also very obvious to us that we don’t know when ‘the Day of the Lord’ will be. Meanwhile we have to get on as best we can with making a life in this world as it is. To do this with the sort of balanced wisdom reflected in ‘the perfect wife’ is a good and a Christian thing to do.
 
That is the most obvious interpretation, but there is a good deal more to this Gospel parable than that. We need, of course, to be careful about treating parables as allegories. But the man of property who goes away and returns after a long absence can safely be understood as Christ the Lord himself. ‘I am going away and shall return’, as Jesus says in St John’s Gospel. So what are the ‘talents’ that he leaves with his servants?
 
St Matthew’s Gospel ends with the risen Lord meeting the disciples in Galilee. He gives them the command to go and baptise all nations; he assures them that he will be with them to the end of time. The essential ‘talent’ entrusted to the Church as a whole, and to each of us individually, is represented by that gift of baptism, and by the enduring presence of Jesus with us. By our baptism we are linked indissolubly to Jesus Christ who has died and risen again for us. In today’s Second Reading St Paul declares ‘You are all children of light and children of the day’. In the waters of baptism we are drowned and buried with Christ and rise from them to share his risen life. Through the waters of baptism we pass from darkness to light; our personal candle is lit from the Easter light of the One who is the Light of the World. Whatever our personal gifts, that is the true Talent with which we have been entrusted. The fundamental vocation of each one of us is to make the most of that talent in this life. ‘Let us put on faith and love for a breastplate, and the hope of salvation for a helmet’ says St Paul. This is the Christian warfare – the battle against everything within us, and indeed outside us, that militates against the growth in us of faith and hope and love; the battle against everything that hinders the deepening of that relationship with the risen Christ which has been given to us in our baptism.
 
In the Gospel parable there are two responses. There are those who take the talent and trade with it. And there is the one who buries the talent in the ground. It is one of the tragedies of the Church that there are so many talents buried in the ground. So many baptised people for whom baptism is the end of the matter, not the beginning. And we have to take some responsibility for that. But the fact that we are here means that we are taking our trading reasonably seriously.  But as this Sunday has moved the imagery in a military direction, maybe we could usefully examine our lives according to the values which this way of life accentuates.
 
We pray that we may not be called to lay down our lives for our faith, but we cannot escape from that possibility; not if we follow the Lord who did exactly that for our sake. But the other things to which the life of the armed services recalls us are the sense of interdependence, and a discipline which springs from a clear focus on the central task to be accomplished. We are here at Mass because we recognise that interdependence in Christ; we are members of the Body of Christ; we call on the saints, ‘on whose constant intercession in your presence we rely for unfailing help’. We are also here at Mass because it recalls us to our true centre; indeed that Centre is made really present for us.
 
The Church’s discipline of Sunday Mass we understand, but the harder thing is the discipline which enables us to hold that central focus through all the aspects of our daily life. This is the purpose of those traditional Christian disciplines – reading Scripture ‘Day by Day’ to soak ourselves more deeply in  it; ‘the practice of the presence of God’ in prayer both formal and informal; reflecting back on each day asking myself in the light of God’s Holy Spirit ‘How have I today reflected the faith, hope and love to which I am called?’
 
To take such questions seriously is inevitably to recognise that I fall short. It could simply lead to guilt, and that would be a disaster. But at the heart of our faith is the God who is infinite in mercy and forgiveness; the God who never gives up on us. So there is no need to bury the talent in the ground because to be less than perfect is depressing or discouraging. The regular discipline of looking at my life in the light of Christ, and in the presence of the Christ who never ceases to look on me with love – that is to trade with my talent. However little profit we may think we have made, however small the things in which we have been faithful, the invitation will surely be there to join in the joy of the Lord.
 
 
ALL SAINTS (2011)

May I begin by saying on behalf of Hinksey Catholic Parish, and especially on behalf of the community who regularly worship in this church of the Holy Rood, how good it is to be sharing this solemn feast with those who have come into full communion with the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham. At this Mass it is evident that this particular Ordinariate community bring rather special musical gifts, and we are naturally very grateful for that. But I am personally very glad that we have been able to offer them a home here, and I hope very much that we will be able to have these shared celebrations relatively often, as may be liturgically appropriate. And feasts occurring during the week are an obvious example of this. And somehow the Feast of All Saints is a particularly good moment to start. After all, saints are incredibly various – even those officially canonised. And as we take into account today the vast numbers who have surely attained great holiness but without that formal recognition, they must be more various still. But there is only one communion of saints, as there is only one Body of Christ, and to that we all belong. This feast puts us in our place, on the fringe of this great garment of praise, and reminds us of our fundamental unity. Whatever the future holds for the Ordinariate, it would be tragic if it became in any permanent way a self-consciously separate group within the Church. It has been so good that this sharing of a building has also been accompanied by an encouragement to share in each other’s Masses in a quite natural way. Osmosis, it seems to me, is greatly to be encouraged.
 
One feature of the Ordinariate is that it has from its very inception been using the New English Translation of the Roman Missal. Not only that, but it has been using the Revised Standard Version of the Scriptures, as we have done this evening. This is intended for the rest of us as well, but it probably won’t come about for at least another five years, I guess. However, since last week, when that great box of Altar Missals arrived, we have been using not only the texts on the laminated card, but also the prayers as well. And if you remember the old version of the Collect for All Saints, you will have noticed that today’s prayer was a good deal longer. The old prayer simply said ‘Father,…we rejoice in the saints of every age.’ The new one says ‘Almighty God, by whose gift we venerate the merits of all the Saints.’
 
You will not be surprised to learn that this is what the Latin original actually says. The old prayer had no mention of God’s gift – of God’s grace. It was, I suppose, taken for granted. But you will notice again and again in the new prayers, as we go through the year, that they continually emphasise God’s grace. I suppose you could say that the prayer today is speaking about God’s gift to the Church of this actual Feast – the Feast of All Saints. But there is also the implication that it is by God’s gift, by God’s grace, that the saints are indeed saints. Whatever virtue or holiness the saints have, it is the work of God’s grace.
 
That doesn’t of course mean that becoming a saint is a kind of automatic process. The saints had to co-operate with God’s grace; they had to respond to it, as indeed do we. After all we are all called to be saints, and in the last resort there is no other destiny for the Christian. We are all called to co-operate with God’s grace, although we don’t always do so. But the important thing is that it is God’s grace which always comes first. And that is something which the texts of the Missal constantly reinforce. One of the reasons for a new translation was the weakness of the old one in this respect.
 
Again, the Latin speaks of the merits of the saints – a word which the old prayer simply ignores. The implication of the prayer is that there is a connection between the merits of the saints and their power as intercessors.  Some Christian traditions have been very wary of this word ‘merit’. But it is important to realise that there is no kind of opposition between the idea of ‘merit’ and God’s gift, God’s grace. The merits of the saints are themselves the work of God’s grace; the merits of the saints are a gift from God. Likewise, there is no opposition, or competition, between the holiness of God and the holiness of the saints. The holiness that is manifest in the saints doesn’t in any way distract us from the holiness of God; it actually is the holiness of God, or perhaps it would be better to say it is one facet of the holiness of God, manifested in this particular person made in God’s image. We are, after all, members of the Body of Christ. The holiness which belongs to the Head of the Body really is shared with the members of the Body.
 
So the Opening Prayer sees these graced, holy people above all as intercessors. It is their prayers which will help us to ‘lay aside every weight’ as St Paul says, to overcome the barriers which still keep us from full reconciliation with God. It is strange that some Christians have had real problems with asking for the prayers of the saints, when asking for the prayers of one’s fellow Christians on earth is such an obvious and uncontroversial thing to do. And within that earthly context would one not most naturally go either to those closest to you, or especially to those you saw as closest to God – those who seemed to reflect God’s holiness?  Several people have recently spoken to me about ‘thin’ places – places where God’s presence seems especially close. And surely that sort of thinness must exist within the Body of Christ – between those on earth and the saints in heaven. That is surely one implication of the teaching of St Paul that baptism is the real moment of our death. It is the grace of our baptism which breaks down the barrier between us and our brothers and sisters who give God eternal praise in the heavenly Jerusalem.
 
There is then something both obvious and natural about asking for the intercession of the saints in the context of our shared membership of the Body of Christ. And yet some of the expressions of that intercession are at least curious. One of the most curious comes in a hymn which I dearly love, ‘Hail, Queen of heaven, the ocean star.’ In it we ask Mary to remind her Son that he has died for us. It is, I suppose, a sort of extension of her role at the wedding at Cana. But it is, of course, perfectly obvious that God is incapable of being absent-minded. Despite the images of God that some people have grown up with, it is also not true that God spends most of his time being cross with us. Some of the hymns involving the prayers of the saints seem to imply this. But God isn’t forgetful; God is not angry or cross. The Father, indeed, as Jesus tells us, ‘knows what we need before we ask’. But, as Jesus also strongly insists, it is important for us to ask. God waits upon the asking of his creatures. St Francis wrote that famous prayer, ‘Make me an instrument of your peace’. I suppose many of us encounter that prayer most frequently is the hymn version of it – ‘Make me a channel of your peace’. A channel is not quite the same thing as an instrument, but it has long seemed to me a very good image for the prayer of intercession. God knows what we need before we ask, but waits for a channel to be opened up through which his grace can flow. It must surely be true that those who are holy, those who are closest and most open to God, must also be the most open channels of grace. Saints of God, come to our aid; all holy men and women, pray for us.
 
31st SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

One of the stories that has been at the centre of the news this week has been the protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. In some reports, the protesters have been treated as rather absurd and irresponsible; likewise the response of closing the Cathedral, apparently under the guise of following health and safety regulations, has been seen as rather feeble. There has also been the resignation of Canon Giles Fraser, who, on the Cathedral steps, originally welcomed the protesters.
 
In the same week, the Vatican (that is, in this case, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace) has published a document on the Reform of International Financial Systems;  a document that builds on Pope Benedict’s last encyclical ‘Caritas in Veritate’, written in 2009. William Keegan has written about this document in this week’s edition of ‘The Tablet’.
 
The resignation of Canon Fraser seems particularly unfortunate. Initially he made an attempt to support the protesters, and, I suppose, hoped that this would lead to some kind of conversation. I have since discovered that one of his responsibilities was the ‘St Paul’s Institute’, which is specifically concerned with trying to make relationships with the financial institutions in the City of London, and with promoting dialogue and ethical reflection. No doubt his initial response to the protesters was intended to engage them in such a dialogue.
 
The striking thing about this protest is that it is a local expression of a protest which began in Wall Street, but which has spread all over the world. And it surely is not just an expression of anger and disgust at the insensitivity and greed of certain bankers. It is rather, you could say, a prophetic sign. It is a sign, if one were needed, that the present system of global finance has failed the human community. You might say that no prophetic sign is needed, for that fact is blindingly obvious. But part of the function of prophecy is to draw attention to the obvious. Indeed the image of a protest camp beside a Christian Church at the very heart of one of the greatest financial centres in the world is a very powerful image indeed.
 
At heart, a powerful and prophetic image – but what has happened to it? The focus has shifted, as it always does, from the purpose of the protest to the protest itself. And the issue for the Church is seen simply in terms of getting its tourist revenues back, and being health and safety compliant. The protest has highlighted a real issue, but a protest is a protest, not a dialogue or discussion. There are few more important issues in the world than the one it highlighted; and St Paul’s Cathedral, clearly, is not just a tourist attraction or a national monument. It is actually trying to provide, as part of its Christian witness, a forum where those who are actually engaged in international finance can try to grapple with the ethical issues it raises. It surely seeks to contribute to some sort of vision about how the financial market might be shaped, how the economy might be organised, and organised so as to contribute to the common good.
 
The Vatican document deals, as you would expect, precisely with these issues. It talks, perhaps in rather idealistic terms, of the need for some sort of global authority. It isn’t a particularly easy document, but it isn’t just a piece of bland ‘Vatican-speak’. It is really trying to contribute to the search for an economic way forward which will benefit humanity as a whole. And just how difficult these issues are has been graphically demonstrated by the leaders of Europe in recent days.
 
How does all this link with the Scriptures which we have heard proclaimed at this Mass? Both the prophet Malachi and Jesus in the Gospel have harsh things to say to professional clergy. In a church context, we can recognise all too easily to what these words might apply. But in their essence they apply equally to our society – at least to the affluent societies of the world. ‘Everything they do is done to attract attention’ – here is the celebrity culture and the ostentation of wealth and fashion. But it is Malachi who points to what is wrong with this. ‘If you do not listen, if you do not find it in your hearts to glorify my name, says the Lord of hosts…’. What is completely missing is any reference point beyond the judgement of my peers. What is missing is the centrality of God. And that is the fundamental point that Jesus is making in the second part of the Gospel.
 
I heard recently of a priest, now quite a distinguished scripture scholar, who at the time that he offered himself for the priesthood was very anxious to be true to Scripture. He was summoned to visit the Bishop. On this visit, he tied himself in terrible knots, because he knew it was customary to address the Bishop as ‘Father’; but he also remembered that Jesus had said, ‘Call no man ‘Father’!  How he survived the interview I don’t know, but he clearly did. And by now he will certainly understand better the point of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is, of course, warning against making any absolute claims for human fathers or human teachers or human masters. You have one father, God. You have one teacher, the Christ. Every human authority, at any level, is ultimately subject to the authority of God, the true and only God - God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
 
It is very difficult to see how the majority of financiers, or indeed any other people who wield great power in our world, can come to recognise that they need to work not for their selfish ends, but for the common good. Very difficult, unless they do see themselves, and their fellow human beings, as subject to the living God.  The Vatican document, outlining its global vision, reminds us at the end that ‘given wounded human nature, this will not come about without anguish and suffering.’ But all such documents, papal or otherwise, are addressed to ‘all people of goodwill’. Certainly, not all those who take part in dialogue in St Paul’s Cathedral about the ethics of finance will be Christian believers. But among such influential people there will be those who are truly people of goodwill.  But what about us? What about those who do not understand economics and do not wield power and influence?
 
However blindly, we are part of this world of reckless debt and tottering financial systems. It isn’t just the bankers. We may not be able to contribute directly to the solution. But what has been missing, what has led to this mess; what is missing, and therefore what is needed, is the listening to God- the listening to God and the glorifying of God’s name. Alongside the protest is the Cathedral. We may not be able to take part in the technicalities of the dialogue, even if we could with justice join the protesters. But we all have a part to play in the Cathedral – in the building which witnesses to the ultimate authority of God. ‘O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor haughty my eyes. I have not gone after things too great, nor marvels beyond me. Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace.’ In so far as I place myself in faith and in hope in that humble place before God, that place where before God I am on the level with all other members of the human race, that place where I cannot do other than desire the common good – in so far as I place myself there, with all the others in what one might call the ‘virtual Cathedral’, I am, however invisibly, a witness to the truth, the reality, the ultimate authority of God.  As such I am a humble servant of God’s good purpose for humanity.         
   
 
29th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

This Sunday’s readings provide an interesting sandwich. The filling, as it were, is St Paul’s words to the little Christian community in Thessalonika. This is sandwiched between two important figures of secular history, two leaders of two of the world’s greatest empires, Cyrus the Great of Persia, and ‘Caesar’ – the Emperor of Rome, in this case the Emperor Tiberius. Cyrus conquered Babylon nearly six hundred years before Christ, and allowed the Jewish exiles to return home and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Thus Isaiah sees him as an anointed instrument of God. And the Roman Empire provides the secular background to the whole narrative of the Gospels. St Luke, in particular, mentions the Emperor Augustus in his narrative of the birth of Jesus. Later he tells us that it was in the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius that John the Baptist began to preach – the event which led directly into the public ministry of Jesus himself.
 
We could, of course, forget all that, and concentrate simply on the filling of the sandwich. Thessalonika was an important city in secular terms. However, in the Reading we don’t see that. Rather we have a glimpse of a small but devoted Church community, a little group of the ‘chosen’. They are pursuing their particular spiritual path in a way which is very gratifying to St Paul. But it was surely totally invisible to the wider secular world. We appear to see here, in fact, religion as a private activity; religion as it is very widely seen in our secular world today.
 
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is faced with a trick question. The issue is about a conflict of loyalties. Can you be loyal both to the secular ruler and to God? It is a question that became much more acute for early Christian communities, when they were asked to sacrifice to the secular ruler – to the Roman Emperor – who set himself up as God. Effectively, this was the secular state demanding ultimate and absolute loyalty. But that is not exactly the issue here. And Jesus neatly sidesteps the issue with that famous reply, ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.’
 
That reply could be seen as an endorsement of the dominant view of religion in our secular world. ‘What belongs to God’ is a private affair; let people get on with their religious practice, as long as it doesn’t impinge on the life of the secular world.’ What Jesus is actually saying is something very different. He is recognising the role of secular government, but seeing this not apart from God, but under God. Caesar has a proper function, but, ultimately, everything belongs to God. So, in his First Letter, St Peter acknowledges the importance of being subject to the civil government, even in a situation where Christians are also being persecuted.  How did there come to be a small community of Christians in Thessalonika? How did St Paul manage to travel so effectively around the Mediterranean? It was due to the trade and communications, and the relative peace, which were established by the Roman Empire. Whether it is the Emperor Cyrus the Great, six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, or the Roman Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, these rulers can all be seen as having a place in the overall purpose of God – God’s purpose of salvation. As Isaiah represents God as saying in the First Reading: ‘I have called you by your name, though you do not know me’.
 
So, then, what we would naturally see as secular events have their place in God’s plan of salvation. That seems to be clear. But it might also lead us in some dangerous directions.
 
As I was thinking about Cyrus as God’s anointed, I remembered ‘the axis of evil’. Wasn’t there a point when the American government committed itself to the destruction of what it called ‘ the axis of evil’? It is one thing to see some aspect of world events as directly contributing in fact to God’s plan of salvation. It is quite another to take upon yourself, as it were, to do the saving work of God for Him; in your role as Caesar, as secular power, to take on what belongs to God alone. Evil infects us all; we are all to some extent flawed. We are all in need of God’s mercy and redemption. The secular power which takes upon itself the destruction of evil will probably be blind to the evil at work within itself – a dangerous arrogance. Cyrus did God’s work, but he wasn’t doing it consciously, and certainly not taking on God’s role. ‘I have called you by your name, though you do not know me.’
 
A second danger is a sort of fatalism. It must be true that nothing happens outside God’s ultimate governance. Everything that exists is held in being by God. But everything that happens cannot in a direct and simple sense be described as ‘the will of God’. We believe in God’s providence, but that is not quite the same thing. What has been revealed in that whole history related in the Scriptures – that whole history leading up to the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus – is not God’s micro-management of his creation, but his will and power to rescue and redeem it, and to do so in a way which respects our freedom and, in Jesus, works from within it.
 
A third danger could be a sort of small-mindedness. One reading of Isaiah could be that God had organised the whole empire of Cyrus in order to allow a small number of Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild the temple. And in the Second Reading, St Paul refers to that little community of Christians as the ones God loves and has chosen. Is the whole world, then, simply organised for the benefit of the Christian community?
 
The answer is, in fact, the exact opposite. The truth is that the Christian community exists for the benefit of the whole world. Why is Cyrus seen by Isaiah as ‘God’s anointed’ – a forerunner of the Messiah?
Because Isaiah can see, and indeed we can see, that Cyrus has a crucial place in the story, that extraordinary story which is the preparation of the Jewish people to be the context of the birth not only of their Messiah, but of the One who has been revealed as the Saviour of the world.
 
Similarly, St Paul encouraged that little community in Thessalonika by affirming their way of life. He underlines the importance of their living faith in Jesus Christ; he affirms the loving way in which they respond to each other; he commends their perseverance in hope, in spite of the fact that the second coming of Christ seems to be delayed, and their impact on the wider world seems negligible. But St Paul does all this against the background of his conviction that in Christ there is a new beginning – a new beginning for the whole of creation. This little Church and its life is a seed of this new creation and a pointer towards it.
 
The salvation of God is no longer something confined just to one particular people, the Jews. Rather the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had broken down the old partition walls. He is now revealed as the universal King, the true Emperor, to whom alone ultimate allegiance is due. The promise originally made to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through him is now on the brink of fulfilment. ‘Give to God what belongs to God.’ Ultimately all human history belongs to Christ, and as St Paul says elsewhere, ‘You are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’
 
 
24th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

There is an image which has never been far from my mind since I first saw it last week. It is the photograph of someone falling head-first from one of the World Trade Centre towers on ‘9/11’ – now ten years ago. Someone falling to their death, and possibly killing someone below when they fell. It is a horrifying image, especially when you consider the terror and panic which must have led to that jump in the first place. And when you consider how many thousand times the tragedy surrounding that death was multiplied on that day. And now, of course, we are hearing of the long-term effects – the illnesses affecting, in particular, those who so bravely took part in the rescue effort; those  who were therefore exposed for the longest period to the toxic dust. Around this tenth anniversary there is inevitably considerable media interest in the stories of those who were there, whether as witnesses or survivors. I was not particularly surprised to hear someone say that it was the moment when they lost their faith in God.
 
The tenth anniversary of that outrage happens to fall on a Sunday. And on a Sunday when the theme of the Scripture readings is forgiveness. It is quite a challenge. Naturally enough, one of the first responses to this act of wanton murder and destruction was to promise that it would be avenged. The desire for vengeance is a very natural human desire.  That remarkable First Reading from Ecclesiasticus, which foreshadows the Gospel in an extraordinary way, starts from that natural human response. ‘Resentment and anger, these are foul things, and both are found with the sinner. He who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the Lord, who keeps strict account of sin.’  Vengeance for 9/11 has surely been part of the motivation for a good deal that has happened since then, culminating in the ultimate assassination of Osama bin Laden.
 
Historically, there have been systems of justice built on the principle of revenge, and indeed in some contexts they still operate. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus refers to the principle of fair revenge set out in the Book of Exodus – ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. The aim of that law ( known as the ‘lex talionis’) was not to encourage revenge, but to set limits to it. But Jesus goes beyond this principle of fairness. The law of the Kingdom of God says, ‘Offer no resistance to the wicked’. Vengeance without limit simply encourages the spiral of evil. Limitation, such as the Old Testament offers, means that at least justice might be seen to be satisfied. The Gospel principle set forth by Jesus is not one by which states in this present world can organise their foreign policy, but it does take us to the heart of our faith. This is what Jesus taught, and this is what Jesus lived. He offered no resistance to the wicked, and it led him to the Cross. ‘Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.’
 
‘Offer no resistance to the wicked’ says Jesus. This could be seen as a position of weakness. The forgiving attitude of the Christian has sometimes been portrayed in that light. There is the supposedly forgiving attitude which says ‘It’s all right; it doesn’t matter’, when underneath you are seething. And there is the supposedly forgiving attitude of someone who allows themselves simply to be walked over – the attitude of the Christian doormat.
 
But no one could accuse Jesus of being a doormat. He was not afraid to speak the truth to his enemies, at whatever cost. The king in the Gospel today is not just an easy push-over. He is well aware of what justice demands, and indeed the end of the parable shows that he is ready to implement it. Forgiveness in this story is not a step short of justice, but a step beyond it. And in the story, the servant to whom the king offers the cancellation of an unimaginably vast debt – this servant is unable to receive that forgiveness, because he is not open to forgive the very small debt of his fellow servant. He is a person without compassion.
 
The world of vengeance, the world of resentment and anger,  a world which we see around us constantly both at the level of personal and family relationships and at the level of political power struggles and armed conflict, is a world fundamentally closed to God. ‘If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord’. So says St Paul in the Second Reading. He says this in contrast to ‘Living and dying for myself’ – living and dying open to the Lord, in contrast to living and dying in a world not open to God. And the same contrast is there in the First Reading from Ecclesiasticus. This makes clear that judgement, in the end, is not for us, but for God.
 
And one of the most extraordinary lines in that extraordinary passage is this: ‘If a man nurses anger against another, can he then demand compassion from the Lord? Showing no pity for a man like himself, can he then plead for his own sins?’ The thing that strikes me here, is that the person who has been wronged is asked to be understanding and compassionate towards the one who has wronged him.
 
What this suggests to me, whether we are thinking about personal relationships or events like 9/11, is an awareness that we are all, in fact, caught up in a great web – a web of selfishness, distortion and blindness. We are all flawed beings. Created good, created in God’s image, but flawed. That is what is meant by the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve. 9/11 was an utterly evil action, but it did not come from nowhere. Those towers were symbols of a flawed greed and domination. Nothing can justify the hideous crime, but sinfulness was not only on one side, and that is always the case.
 
So where is the hope? For human beings living in a closed world, a world without God, a world where the establishment of justice is entirely in their own hands, there is no hope. The hope lies in the belief that this is not how things are. The hope lies in the truth that beyond and behind our human struggle for justice lies the justice of God. It is, as Ecclesiasticus says, a justice which keeps strict account of sin, just as the king in the parable kept a strict account of his servant’s debt. But it is a justice which goes beyond that; it is a justice which bears the cost of the whole mess of human self-seeking, the whole cost of a world at odds with itself and with God. It is the justice which is made visible in the utter darkness of the Cross, when one who is wholly innocent dies a hideously cruel death. It is the justice which is made visible in the moment when God is experienced as entirely absent, but when that great prayer is offered, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’.
 
 
HOMILY for 23rd SUNDAY of Year ‘A’ (‘The New Translation)

I seem to remember a poster from years ago, which proclaimed ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’. Today feels a bit like that, with the partial inauguration of the New Translation of the Roman Missal.
Any new translation is bound to meet with some resistance in most of us. Unfamiliar words make it harder to focus on the worship of God, because we trip over the words. That is an inevitable problem, which only time and growing familiarity will heal. God knows our hearts and understands when we stumble. Please don’t worry about your mistakes today, or next week, or the week after… Let’s not worry about that, but recognise our deepest intention – the worship and praise of God, and our prayer as a priestly people in the midst of God’s world… And our musicians will help. I am very grateful for the creative preparatory work they have put in leading up to this day. Also, no translation is perfect. Some turns of phrase irritate me – some may irritate you. Let’s not allow ourselves to be put off by such things, but to see it whole…
 
I want now to draw attention to three underlying motives behind the new translation. First, we naturally think of ourselves simply as ‘Catholics’. We belong to the universal family of the Church, and we celebrate here the one true Sacrifice, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ one offered on the Cross and renewed, made present, at every Mass. Of course that is the heart of the matter. But if, for example, we lived in the Ukraine, we might be Catholics, but ‘Eastern Catholics’ – using the Greek liturgy of St John Chrysostom. However in Western Europe we are ‘Latin’ Catholics. The original language of the liturgy we all share is Latin. Anywhere in the ‘Latin’ Church we can always use that original language if it seems appropriate. So one aim of the New Translation is to bring the English closer to the Latin original; to increase that sense of a shared liturgical heritage within what we often simply call the ‘Western’ Church, but which we should perhaps more properly call the ‘Latin Church’.
 
That is one strand of thinking behind the New Translation, although not the most important. We will meet an example of it at the very beginning of Mass, and it is probably the one that is going to catch us out most of all. When the priest says ‘The Lord be with you’, you reply ‘And with your spirit.’ The Latin, as many of you will remember, is ‘Dominus vobiscum’, to which the reply is ‘Et cum spiritu tuo’. I’m going to say a bit more later on about the meaning of that phrase ‘and with your spirit’. But the immediate point is that it is a literal translation of the Latin, ‘et cum spiritu tuo’.  Over the last forty years we have got used to saying ‘and also with you’. But every other translation of the Mass – Spanish, French, whatever – has kept that word ‘spirit’ in. Only English has changed it. So that change is in part not only of an attempt to come closer to the Latin original, but a little way of making other language groups feel more at home with the English translation. Years ago, because the language was Latin, wherever you were you recognised the parts of the Mass. We have now lost that, but little things like ‘and with your spirit’ give familiar clues to those unfamiliar with English.
 
Secondly, a much more important motive behind the new translation is to bring out the many references to Scripture which are scattered through the original Latin text. Many of these have been lost in the fairly free translation which we have been using up to now. A clear example is in the words which are used as an invitation to Holy Communion. We have been used to the priest saying ‘This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.’ In fact this is a combination of two Scripture texts. The first is the words of John the Baptist in St John’s Gospel, as he points out Jesus to the disciples: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world’. The second is a quotation from the Apocalypse: ‘Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’
The new words are much closer to Scripture, and consequently richer in meaning. Indeed, a whole understanding of the Mass could be unpacked from those two texts if there were time.
 
And to this invitation, what do we respond? ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed’. That is a literal translation of the Latin, but more importantly, it is a direct quotation from the Gospels. When Jesus offers to come to the centurion’s house to heal his servant, the centurion says, ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my servant will be healed.’ As the Lord offers to come to us in Holy Communion we put ourselves into the Gospel story; we place ourselves in the shoes of that humble centurion.
 
The New Translation, then, seeks to be closer to the Latin original, and closer to Scripture. But, finally, there is a further motive behind this translation. It is clear that the intention is to deepen the sense of the holy mystery which we celebrate in the Eucharist. This is a difficult issue. For in some ways the Mass deals with very ordinary, everyday things. It is a meal involving bread and wine. But also it is a sharing in the mysterious action through which God has redeemed the world and is bringing about his Kingdom. That contrast is the contrast at the heart of our faith – God himself, the unimaginable and eternal Mystery, made manifest in human flesh. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
 
The translators have sometimes tried to heighten this sense of mystery by using special words not in common use. One example would be in the words of consecration. No longer ‘this is the cup of my blood’, but ‘this is the chalice of my blood’. This corresponds to the fact that we do, out of reverence for the mystery, have a very special cup at Mass, and call it by the Latin name ‘calix’ or ‘chalice’. But there is no easy answer to this matter of how to hold together the ordinariness of our lives within the mystery of the God who comes to meet us and take those ordinary lives up into His life, to take our humanity up into His life, in Jesus, true God and true Man.
 
That is the mystery into which we are taken up in every Mass, and at least the aim of the new translation is to help us to a deeper sense of that mystery. I have in fact already referred to another example of that – the phrase ‘Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb’. It looks forward, as every Mass looks forward, to the final establishment of God’s Kingdom, to the ‘marriage feast’ of God’s Kingdom. It looks forward to what St Paul calls ‘God’s new creation’, which has already been inaugurated in the person of Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead. The Kingdom already exists in the risen Jesus, and we already share in it through the gift of the Holy Spirit given us in Baptism and Confirmation. We continue to live our ordinary everyday lives in this world, but we do so in the context of the risen Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit who unites us to the Body of the Risen Christ, and in whose power we seek to live even now by the values not of this world but of God’s new creation. That is our true home. And we come to Mass each week to rediscover our true home and to be re-located, so to speak, within it – through Jesus Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to give glory and honour to God the Almighty Father. That is what we exist for; that is what the world is created for. And that, indeed, is the proper context in which to see that little response ‘The Lord be with you’ ‘And with your spirit.’
 
Today’s Gospel ends with the words of Jesus, ‘Where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them’. The priest begins, in effect, not by saying a version of ‘Good morning’, but by reminding everyone that we are now assembled in the very presence of the Lord, and as his Body, the Church. ‘The Lord be with you’. And you reply, ‘And with your spirit.’ As we begin Mass, and as we are reminded five times during Mass, we assemble in the presence of the Lord himself and united with him through the Holy Spirit. We assemble as part of his New Creation inaugurated through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of his Spirit. And at the beginning of Mass and throughout the Mass, you pray for the priest and deacon, that they will exercise the gift of the Spirit which they have been given for their specific ministries within the Body – that they will exercise that ministry with due attention and recollection and in the power of the Holy Spirit - gathering the Assembly; proclaiming the Gospel, offering the sacrifice of Christ, sending the priestly Body out in service of the world. In a moment we will be saying, not, as it were, ‘Good morning, everybody’ ‘Good morning, Father’, but, as part of God’s new creation in Christ, we shall say ‘The LORD be with you’ ‘And with your SPIRIT.’
 
 
Homily for the Feast of SS Peter and Paul

Apart from the Feast of All Saints, this feast is the only celebration of saints which is also a Holy Day of Obligation. Why should it be given this particular prominence? The reason is to be found in Opening Prayer. That prayer states that through St Peter and St Paul the Church first received the faith. In some ways that is a surprising assertion.
 
Certainly it is clear from the New Testament that St Peter was the leader and the spokesman for the twelve apostles. It is equally clear that St Paul was outstanding in his mission to the Gentiles. But tradition has it that other apostles also travelled the world and founded churches. For example, St Thomas is venerated as the apostle who brought the Christian faith to India. So not every church ‘first received the faith’ through St Peter and St Paul.
 
The key to this feast is that both St Peter and St Paul were martyred in Rome. It was the Church in Rome that first received the faith through St Peter and St Paul. So the Opening Prayer of the Mass is a very Roman prayer. In fact you could say that we here in this country are able to pray it precisely because we are Roman Catholics. We are Christians in communion with the Church of Rome.
 
So two things lie behind this feast. The first is that St Peter and St Paul ended up in Rome because it was the centre of the known world. The Christian mission was, and is, a mission to the whole world. ‘God so loved the world that he sent his only Son..’. To get to Rome in the days of St Peter and St Paul was to get to the heart of the world.
 
Secondly, no other church could claim to have been founded by two such tremendous witnesses to the faith. It was because of this that the church in Rome became a touchstone. If you wanted to know whether a particular understanding of the faith was a true one, the best way to be sure was to ask the question, ‘Is it the faith of St Peter and St Paul?’ Therefore, is it the faith of the Church which inherited their witness? This very early understanding still survives for us today. 
 
The Bishop is the guardian and teacher of the faith in his diocese. This is true of every bishop, and it is true of the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is, as it were, the repository of the faith of the Church of Rome, which is the faith of St Peter and St Paul. So we still believe that it is important to be in communion with him; we still believe that it is important to be Roman Catholics.
 
Shortly we are going to be receiving a new English translation of the Missal. What we know simply as ‘the Missal’ actually has on its spine, even now, the words ‘Roman Missal’. The new translation, we are constantly reminded, is a new translation of the Roman Missal.
 
There are a number of reasons for this new translation. But one of them is to make sure that the faith of the Church of Rome, the faith of St Peter and St Paul, does not get ‘lost in translation’. No translation is ever perfect, but some so-called translation can get so far from the original that it is actually misleading. It may not be obvious that this is the case with the translation we have been used to for the past forty years, but  in any case, this is something which the new translation is anxious to avoid. So one feature of it is that it sticks very closely to the Latin original. As a result it may occasionally feel a bit stilted.
 
I mention the new translation of the Missal in the context of this Feast, because it is in fact a particular instance of a constant tension within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is by definition ‘universal’. It is the Church for the whole world in all its diversity. And that diversity has never been so evident as it is today. Our world is a very much bigger and more diverse place than the world of St Peter and St Paul. But within this universal context, the integrity of God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ – the faith professed by St Peter in the Gospel – must not be lost. It must not be  ‘lost in translation’, as it were, as the message is taken out into different cultures and circumstances.
 
History shows how easily distortion can happen. As in the earliest centuries, so now, we have to keep returning to the touchstone – to the faith of St Peter and St Paul. We need both to try to express the universal faith in a way which speaks to our own time and place, and to make sure that it is true to the original witness to Christ. That is a tension with which the Catholic Church always, and inevitably, lives. That tension is sometimes uncomfortable, just as the new translation of the Mass will perhaps also sometimes feel a little uncomfortable. Perhaps it will help to see this discomfort, if we experience it, as an aspect of that wider necessary and inevitable tension. And to remind ourselves that behind all this, what we all fundamentally want is to be true to the faith of St Peter and St Paul, to be true to that Gospel confession of St Peter: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ 
 
 
PENTECOST 2011 (OLOR)

One of the hazards of Oxford, particularly in the summer months, is the columns of tourists who completely take over the pavements. I normally encounter them as they are streaming out from the coach park towards the city centre, or pouring back again to the buses down St Aldates’. I am sure we should be grateful for their presence, and I hope they are of great benefit to the city’s economy. I also hope that they themselves derive something good from their brief experience. They are, as they say, ‘doing’ Oxford; ‘doing’ Oxford in a day.
And here a we, on this Solemn Feast of Pentecost, in a rather similar situation. The Church seems to invite us, after all these lovely weeks of Eastertide, to do Pentecost in a day; to ‘do the Holy Spirit’ in a day. After all, on Monday, it is back to green again. On Monday we are back in ‘Ordinary Time’. Although some of us will not notice for a bit, because next week is Trinity Sunday, and First Holy Communions – another ‘white’ day – and straight after that comes Corpus Christi.
 
 So what do they see, those who are trying to do Oxford in a day? I suppose they are taken to the places that make an instant big impression. A quick view of all the dreaming spires from the tower of the University Church. Or a glimpse of Christ Church Hall, particularly impressive these days, no doubt, because of Harry Potter. And where are we taken, when we try to ‘do the Holy Spirit’ in a day? We are taken to an upper room –  the upper room of the Acts of the Apostles, the room where the disciples are waiting, as Jesus had told them to, for the gift of ‘power from on high’.
 
 It is this dramatic gift on which we tend to focus on this feast. And it is a wonderful picture. ‘A powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house, and what seemed like tongues of fire which separated and came to rest on the head of each of them.’ That is the dramatic picture which sticks in our minds when we think of the Feast of Pentecost. And it is followed by an account of the gift of tongues. People from all over the known world hear these rough Gallilean types speaking to them in their own language.
 
These were indeed the dramatic happenings which were associated with the first Christian Feast of Pentecost. These are the events which can clearly be seen to be a fulfilment of the promise of Jesus. The command of Jesus at his Ascension was that his disciples were to wait. And the promise of Jesus was that this waiting would lead to the gift of a power which would enable them to continue his mission; a power that will enable them to take the message of hope, Good News of God’s saving action in Jesus Christ, in the languages of all humanity to the ends of the earth.
 
But it would be a mistake, I think, to fix our minds too much on these dramatic phenomena. At least it would be a mistake to see this celebration of Pentecost as the celebration of the events of a single day.  It is extremely unlikely that those tourists with whom I began have much sense of the breadth or the depth of the life of the University of Oxford as a result of their rapid tour. The celebration of Pentecost, limited to a single day, could be an almost equally shallow and indeed misleading experience.
 
What we are celebrating and rejoicing in today is not the remarkable events of a single day long ago, but an absolutely essential link in a chain, a link without which we simply would not be here. It is the event of Pentecost which links us here and now to that whole sequence of events which we have been celebrating over the weeks of Eastertide, and indeed to all that went before them. What we have been celebrating throughout this year, as we do every year, is the action of God in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. What we have been celebrating is God’s decisive and victorious action by which the world’s separation from God, the world’s alienation from God, has been overcome in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus - Jesus the Word of God made flesh. Every time you come to Confession you hear those wonderful words which precede the Absolution: ‘God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself’. In the person of Jesus Christ, that final reconciliation, that re-creation of the world, that new creation, has been achieved. That is the truth and the mystery which we set forth, which we make present, at the heart of every Mass.
 
So what is the work of the Holy Spirit? The work of the Holy Spirit is to link that saving work which has been achieved in and by Jesus Christ to every time and place; to link the marvels of God, the wonderful works of God to every time and place. In principle indeed, to link the wonderful works of God to every human person; to take up every human person created in God’s image into the wonderful works of God – people of Mesopotamia and Judaea, people of Egypt and Libya; how in touch with this moment that catalogue suddenly sounds! The work of the Holy Spirit is to bring to completion the saving work of God in Jesus Christ, and to do so through the life and the witness of his Body, the Church.
 
So if we are to focus today on the dramatic events in the upper room on that first Christian Pentecost, we should do so seeing them as a picture, as an icon, of the Church in every time and place. All of us here have received the Holy Spirit in our baptism and confirmation. All of us here have been linked to Jesus Christ in his Body the Church, and are held in that communion by the action of the Holy Spirit. As we pray in the Third Eucharistic Prayer: ‘ Grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son, and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one Body, one Spirit in Christ.’ The Holy Spirit draws us into unity. But as the divided flame which rests on each individual makes clear, and as St Paul in the Second Reading emphasises, the Holy Spirit works in all sorts of different ways in different people; the variety of the Holy Spirit’s working enriches the unity of the Body.
 
The picture, the icon, of the action of the Holy Spirit presented to us in the story of the First Pentecost seems to emphasise the dramatic. This is not surprising, for it was a moment that had and has the potential to transform the world. But we need equally to take note of the variety of the ways in which the Holy Spirit works in different people and at different times. We need to value the action of the Holy Spirit, for example, in those whose painstaking work of administration – the work of Safeguarding -  rebuilds the credibility of the Church where it has been lost through failure and infidelity. We need to recognise the gentle and hidden action of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual journeys of individual people, as much as the dramatic mass conversions that some times and places have witnessed. St Ignatius of Loyola compares the delicacy of the action of the Holy Spirit in one place to a drop of water falling on a sponge.
 
St Paul tells us that only under the influence of the Holy Spirit can we say ‘Jesus is Lord.’  We celebrate today that Spirit of the living God through whose action each of us remains united to Jesus our risen Lord; through whom we are kept together in the unity of his Body the Church. We celebrate today the Spirit of the living God, in whose power we pray that we may be ever more effective signs of the Lordship of Jesus - Jesus in whom alone humanity finds its fulfilment, in whom alone our world will find salvation.
 
 
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year ‘A’

Today’s Gospel ends with an extraordinary, indeed a challenging, statement. ‘Whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself; he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ It is the sort of text we tend to scurry over. It is a bit of an embarrassment. Whoever believes will do greater works than Jesus? But I don’t go around healing the sick and raising the dead; I don’t even do works anything like as great as Jesus, let alone greater. The horrible thought that lurks underneath is about my own faith. Perhaps I don’t really believe. If only I had real faith, then all these things would happen. It is an uncomfortable thought.
 
It is an uncomfortable thought, and I could dismiss it as simply neurotic. But it is uncomfortable partly because it contains at least a grain of truth. I have been baptised into Christ; I have additionally received the Holy Spirit in Confirmation; if I had no faith at all I probably wouldn’t be here. But there is always room for the deepening of faith; there is always room for a more wholehearted following of Jesus Christ. ‘Set yourself close to him’ says St Peter in the Second Reading. There is always a sense in which we could set ourselves closer. And the closer we are, the more we will reflect the life and the light and the healing power which so evidently flowed from Jesus in his earthly life.
 
Provided we give space to that uncomfortable thought, I think there is another way of looking at that uncomfortable text. ‘You will perform even greater works than I do’, says Jesus, ‘because I am going to the Father.’ When we think of the works of Jesus in his earthly life, we tend to think in terms of his miracles. But St John in his Gospel speaks of the miracles of Jesus as ‘signs’. The point of the miracles is not just to show how amazing Jesus is. The point of the miracles of Jesus is that they are, in a sense, acted parables. They are another way of proclaiming the Gospel, the Good News. And the Good News is not essentially that here is a cheaper and more effective substitute for the National Health Service. The Good News is not even that we now have a means of bringing people back to life after they have died, so that they can live to an even greater age in this world as it is. The Good News is that the Kingdom of God is very near to you. The Good News is that this world belongs to God; it is God’s creation; it is a creation of God’s love. The Good News is that the true destiny of human beings is to be caught up into that love. The Good News is that, amazing as it may seem, God has created us to find our fulfilment and wholeness in being caught up into what St Peter calls ‘God’s wonderful light’.
 
The Good News is that the Kingdom of God has come very near. In fact the Kingdom of God has been embodied in our world in the person of Jesus himself – Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus embodies the truth that humanity is created for a loving relationship with God; Jesus embodies the eternal life which God wants to share with us. Jesus is indeed himself the way by which we may come to share those gifts; the path by which all humanity can find its way back home to communion with God; God who in and through Jesus Christ is creating and redeeming us.
 
‘Whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself; he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ When the eternal Son of God, the one who is the image of the Father, took on our humanity in the womb of Mary, he subjected himself to the limitations of human life. He went about doing good, healing and teaching. But he did so in a tiny compass. He did so, of course, in a very special context. He did so in the context of a special people who had been prepared over centuries to have at least the tools, the background, which would enable them to receive the Good News of the coming near of God’s Kingdom. And within that tiny compass he concentrated particularly on a very small group of close friends. And yet the Good News which Jesus embodied was and is Good News for all people in every time and in every place. So the great commission which Jesus gives to that little band of friends is, ‘Go out and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. Jesus within the limitations of his earthly life could not go and make disciples of all nations. But Jesus who has returned to the Father has empowered his followers to do exactly that. In the power of the Holy Spirit the Good News has been proclaimed and is being proclaimed to all people. It is being proclaimed both in word and in deed. The dramatic nature of the miracles that have accompanied that proclamation is not the point. Any such signs, great or small, are always in the service of one thing. They are there to proclaim Jesus as the one in whom the Father is made visible; Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
 
Miraculous signs are not absent in our day, but they are not particularly common. Miraculous signs can be misunderstood, as they were indeed in the time of Jesus. People focus on the miracle and miss the message. Perhaps the great miracle is that, two thousand years on, the followers of the One who was rejected by men but chosen by God – these followers are still around. The really important sign is the sign of ‘the people set apart’. What one old translation calls ‘a peculiar people’. ‘Peculiar’ is no doubt how many people these days see us. And we should certainly not be ashamed of this. One commentator compares the word for ‘peculiar’ (it is ‘set apart’ in the version we have) – he compares it to the little treasures children sometimes have in their pockets; little things from which they refuse to be separated. That is the way in which we as a church community are precious to God.
 
But the other side of this is linked to being a ‘royal priesthood’. As a community we are set apart to bear witness to the Gospel. We are set apart to continue the works of Jesus Christ. Part of that work was, and is, to bear witness in the world to the absolute centrality of God; to bear witness to the context in which human happiness and fulfilment are ultimately to be found; to bear witness to the ultimate source of life and light. But that witness is inseparable from the priestly work of offering. The priestly work of a life offered to the glory of God. The whole life of Jesus is a life of offering to the Father. The supreme offering - the offering which summed up all the rest – was of course his offering of himself on the Cross. That was the supreme expression of the absolute centrality of God in a world which had become centred upon itself. It was the ultimate act of saying ‘glory to God’; you could even say the ultimate act of praise.  And indeed when we gather as a priestly people for this action which defines us – when we gather to offer the Mass – when we do this, we gather around the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection of our High Priest every act of praise and thanksgiving, every act of intercession for the needs of the whole world.
 
At Mass we express who we are as a peculiar people in a ritual and sacramental way. The Mass links us clearly, and indeed really, to Christ our Head, our High priest, our King. But we are also challenged to be a ‘peculiar people’ in the way in which we live. This is surely our weakest point. For we have become too easily assimilated to the world around us. It isn’t a case of keeping ourselves clean, of remaining unspotted from the world. Rather it is about being a sign to the world. It is about ‘doing greater works’ because Jesus has returned to the Father. We all have a responsibility for this as members of the Church, the Body of Christ. We all need to consider how we can together embody more effectively our call to be a royal priesthood and a peculiar people. ‘Whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself; he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’   
    
  
 

3rd SUNDAY of EASTER, Year ‘A’

‘They recognised him at the breaking of bread.’ That ending is, I suppose, one of the things that makes today’s Gospel many people’s favourite resurrection story. It connects immediately with our experience of the risen Lord. After all it is here, in the breaking of the bread, that we most regularly and clearly encounter Him. And this link is further brought home to us by his vanishing. In Holy Communion we recognise him; we encounter him. But we do not see Jesus as those two disciples saw him. When they had received him in Holy Communion they no longer needed him to be physically visible. ‘He took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; but he had vanished from their sight.’
 
The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is one of the most attractive of resurrection stories, and part of that attraction springs from the link with the Mass. But the other feature which makes it so attractive is that it is a story of accompaniment. ‘Jesus himself came up and walked by their side.’ In today’s Gospel we encounter Jesus as the one who accompanies us on the whole of our life’s journey. That, you could say, is the general point of the Gospel. But, in the light of that, it is worth looking at the detail. The Gospel has, I believe, rather more to tell us about the process of that accompaniment.
 
The context of the particular journey of these two disciples to Emmaus is the things that had been happening in Jerusalem in recent days – the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. But for these two disciples these were the ‘current events’ of the time. They were trying to make some sort of sense of those tragic events which were at that moment closest to their hearts. So it isn’t just the end of this Gospel passage that we can readily transpose into our own time and our own experience. It is, you could say, a Gospel which as a whole meets us exactly where we are. ‘What matters are you discussing as you walk along?’ asks Jesus. What are the things that are really uppermost in your hearts and minds on this day, or indeed on any day? It may be something deeply inward and personal, even something you wouldn’t want to talk about with a close friend. It may be some aspect of your family life – some anxiety or difficulty, something painful that one close to you is going through. It may be uncertainties about employment or difficulties in your working environment. It may be concern about the state of the world – about the suffering taking place in Syria or Libya in the face of which we seem so helpless, and indeed where it is so difficult to know what would be really helpful. And we should not forget that it may be that today you are just brimming over with happiness. Just because the world is full of suffering and tragedy we should not forget or devalue the fact that it is also full of goodness and glory. There is no shame in being surprised by joy. These are the things that make up the reality of our daily lives, and the stranger who comes up with us on the road invites us to share these things with him.
 
One of the curiosities of the Gospel story is that Jesus pretends not to know what is going on. ‘Are you the only person who doesn’t know…?’ says Cleopas. This links with what Jesus teaches elsewhere in the Gospels about prayer. On the one hand he says, ‘Your heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask him.’ And that must be true. But he also says to us, ‘Whatever you want, ask for it’. In today’s Gospel story, Jesus gets the two disciples to articulate, to spell out, what is really on their hearts. And that needs to be a guiding principle of our daily prayer, whether in our formal times of prayer or in our informal times – when we, are, so to speak, just walking along the road in the company of Jesus. In the Gospel Jesus invites the disciples to articulate what is on their hearts, and as they do this, he gives them his full attention.
 
But that, of course, is not the end of the story. When the stranger on the road responds to what he has heard, you might think he is a bit hard. ‘You foolish men! So slow to believe…!’ We may not like it, but I suspect that this is often the reality about ourselves – particularly when we are struggling with something painful or difficult. It isn’t easy to see it in the light of what St Peter in today’s First Reading calls ‘the deliberate intention and foreknowledge of God.’ It isn’t easy to see it in the light of ‘the Christ who was ordained to suffer and to enter into his glory’.  But that is exactly what, in our daily journey with Jesus as our companion, we are invited to do.
 
That may sound, in a sense, almost grandiose. And it might also suggest something close to fatalism, which is quite unchristian. By fatalism I mean the idea that everything that happens is in a quite straightforward sense the will of God, and we just have to submit to it. That, if I may say so, is much closer to Islam. But the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a God of Love. This God of Love has given human beings  freedom. Our faith is not in a God who determines every detail of our lives; our faith is in a God who is a Redeemer. Our faith is in a God of Love who is ultimately able to embrace in that love whatever mess the human race, and its individual members, get themselves into. Our faith is in a God who goes to the limit to save us; a God whose redeeming love is seen supremely and finally in the cross, the cross crowned by the resurrection.
 
How then do we come to understand this mystery of the God of redeeming love in relation to our own lives? The stranger on the road responds to the two disciples by giving a context for their sadness, their questions and their concerns. He starts from Moses and the prophets, and sets those concerns in the context of God’s whole plan of redemption and of salvation. And the climax of that plan of salvation, of course, is the very events which have so distressed them. And would not our hearts burn within us if we had the experience of the risen Lord himself expounding the Scriptures to us? The equivalent for us is generally less dramatic, but equally necessary. We too need to be constantly growing in familiarity with the Scriptures – the Scriptures of  both Old and New Testaments;  Moses and the prophets, but also and supremely ‘the things concerning Jesus’. We need constantly to deepen and renew that familiarity, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church. What is offered to us, for instance, in that little booklet ‘My Day by Day’ – the booklet which contains the daily Mass readings for each month - is just as important as the ‘five-a-day’ constantly proposed to us for our physical well-being. It isn’t that every day our hearts will burn within us, although they will from time to time. Accompaniment, after all, or companionship, is not a matter of constant excitement but of solid and sustaining support, punctuated by moments of warmth and insight as something in that two-way exchange suddenly ‘clicks’.
 
Today particularly, but in fact every day, we are on the Emmaus Road. We are invited to share the truth about ourselves with the Mysterious Stranger who walks alongside us. He in turn not only listens, but shares with us the mystery of Love which in truth never ceases to embrace us. And not perhaps every day, but at least on the First Day of the Week, we are gathered by that Love into a place where the revelation of that mystery of Love is finally and definitively embodied. The Mystery of the Body broken in love, the Blood shed out of love – that Mystery is made real and present for us. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we encounter the risen Lord who accompanies us on every step of our journey – we encounter him as he shares his perfect self-offering with us; we encounter his Real Presence in the breaking of the Bread.
 
 
EASTER SUNDAY 2011

The Easter morning Gospel confronts us not with the risen Jesus but with an empty tomb. ‘They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb’ says Mary. She assumed the body had been stolen. St Matthew indeed records that this was the story that the Jewish authorities made up to cover their embarrassment. If that story were the truth, it would hardly have been included in a Gospel which bears witness to the resurrection. But the empty tomb is important. Attempts to ‘spiritualise’ the resurrection of Jesus, or even to ‘psychologise’ it, miss most of the point. We are not proclaiming that Jesus continued to live in some disembodied, spiritual sense. We are not proclaiming that the disciples were so profoundly marked by their experience of Jesus that they believed that he continued in some way to ‘live on’ in them. We proclaim that the tomb in which the body of Jesus had been laid was discovered to be quite simply empty.
 
Part of what this means is that Jesus risen from the dead is not less than he was before, but, if anything, more. His resurrection is the total transformation of his total being – his humanity, his body and his blood, his soul and his divinity. He continues to be all that he was before, but in a manner appropriate to the one who has conquered sin and death and, if we follow St John, the one who has returned to the Father. It is all very mysterious, as are the accounts of his meetings with his disciples after his resurrection. In today’s First Reading, St Peter says very plainly what the gospel writers also record: ‘We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead’. And yet, of course, he also appears in locked rooms and disappears just as he is recognised. It is all very difficult to get one’s head around. But then so is the idea of the end of the world. And there is a sense in which the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the end of the world. That doesn’t mean that the end of the world is imminent, although of course you never know, it may be. But with the empty tomb, with the resurrection of Jesus, we get a foretaste of that total transformation of our humanity and indeed of God’s good creation – his bodily creation, his material creation – into the glory for which it was destined from the beginning.
 
The tomb was empty, and the disciple who reached it first didn’t dare to go in. Unlike Peter, who typically blundered straight in, John stayed quietly on the threshold, reflecting. And, we are told, ‘he saw and he believed’. John seems to have been like that. He could get it without having to be told. Without having to see Jesus eat a piece of fish, or without having to put his fingers into the marks of his wounds. But it wasn’t like that for all of them. For most of the disciples there had to be a programme of re-education. After all, they had run away. Peter had denied Jesus. They were going back to fishing as if it was all over. That really is the most telling evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. What could have turned the disciples round? What could have made those faithless runaways turn into witnesses who were prepared to die for what they believed? What enabled Peter, who had denied his Lord, to know that he was indeed loved and forgiven and could take up again his place as leader of the Apostles? And what has caused the Church built on their witness to survive all the crises of the last two thousand years, including those in our own time? It continues despite its weakness and failures because the tomb was empty, the Lord is risen, and we meet him today. We don’t just meet him as an idea. We meet him embodied; he meets us as he today meets his followers all over the world. He meets us embodied in the sacrament of his real presence with us; he meets us as we meet to rejoice in his victory – he meets us in his body and blood, in his full humanity and his full divinity, and he meets us with his peace and with his forgiveness and with his challenge.
 
The resurrection of Jesus is at the very heart of our faith. In the earliest days, what distinguished Christians from Jews was that they met together not to keep the Sabbath, the last day of the week, the day of rest, but Sunday. They met on Sunday, the first day of the week, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. As St Paul says, ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is pointless’. So the three days of celebration of the Cross and the Resurrection which ends with Easter – the Easter Triduum – is the high point of the year of the Christian Church. But today’s First Reading, St Peter’s preaching in the Acts of the Apostles, reminds us that these key events did not occur, so to speak, in a vacuum. St Peter bears witness not only to the cross and resurrection, but to ‘everything Jesus did throughout the countryside of Judaea and in Jerusalem itself’. ‘Jesus’, he says, ‘went about doing good’. Jesus spent three years bearing witness to the love and the power of God, proclaiming the closeness of the Kingdom of God. Jesus did this amid the ordinary people of his time and place, their everyday doings and sufferings.
 
But in today’s Second Reading, and in the context of the resurrection of Jesus, St Paul tells us: ‘Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on things on the earth.’ It might seem that St Paul’s words run contrary to that concern of Jesus with our lives of everyday which the First Reading highlights. ‘Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on things on the earth.’ These words can be easily misunderstood. No one, I think, illustrates what this really means better than Shahbaz Bhatti.
 
That may not be a familiar name to you. But you probably do recall being shocked a few months ago by the story of the Governor of the Punjab who was assassinated by his bodyguard. He was assassinated because he had supported a non-Muslim accused of blasphemy in her campaign for justice. That was Salman Taseer, an extremely courageous Muslim.  But Shahbaz Bhatti was the Minister for Minorities in the Pakistan government. He was a Catholic, and had supported the same woman as Salman Taseer. When Shahbaz Bhatti was appointed Minister in 2008, he said that he accepted the appointment in order to help ‘the oppressed, the downtrodden and marginalised, and to send a message of hope to the people living a life of disappointment, disillusionment and despair’. He went on: ‘Jesus is the nucleus of my life, and I want to be his true follower through my actions by sharing the love of God with poor, needy and suffering people of Pakistan.’ He too was assassinated on March 2nd this year.  This, surely, was a life lived in the light and power of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Here, surely, was someone whose ‘thoughts were on heavenly things, not on things of the earth’.
 
Our belief that the tomb was empty, our faith in the resurrection of Jesus, does not separate us from the concerns of the world, but throws us back into it but with a different perspective; with a horizon determined by the One who will be the ultimate judge; the One who out of love laid down his life for his friends; the One who on the Cross forgave his enemies; the One who now is alive and reigns for ever and ever.
 
EASTER VIGIL 2011
It appears that the Bible has acquired another rival. Professor A C Grayling has written a secular ‘Bible’ which he has called ‘The Good Book’. Some of you may have head a radio discussion on the ‘Today’ programme in which both Professor Grayling and Canon Giles Frazer of St Paul’s Cathedral took part. I have only seen it reported in this week’s ‘Tablet’. Apparently John Humphreys asked Canon Frazer whether he thought ‘the Good Book’ contained better rules than the Bible. Canon Frazer appears to have astonished the company by declaring that the Bible was not about rules. The Bible, he said, was about ‘Salvation’.
 
 We have just listened to a whole series of readings from what you might call ‘the Original Good Book’. One or two of them mention ‘the law of God’ in general terms, but apart from that there isn’t a rule to be found. But it would be fair to say that every one of them, except perhaps the first, is about ‘Salvation’. The first is, of course, the story of Creation. And that sets the scene for salvation. It sets before us the essential starting-point for any thinking about God and any relationship with God. It reminds us first, very firmly, that whatever the world may look like, and whatever human beings may get up to, the world is God’s good creation. And secondly it reminds us that human beings have been created in God’s image. They have been created capable of a conscious relationship with God. The First Reading in the Vigil sets before us these two absolutely fundamental points. And in so doing, it reminds us of the scope of what we are celebrating tonight.
 
We sometimes complain that people don’t turn out in huge numbers for this Easter Vigil and Mass, despite the fact that it is in an important sense the biggest liturgical celebration of the whole year. I suspect there are some quite simple practical reasons for that. We should not let this detract from our awareness of the scope of this celebration. What we are celebrating does indeed embrace the whole universe; it embraces all time and all history; it involves not just Catholics, not just Christians, not just religious people; it involves the whole human race. This was made wonderfully clear at the very beginning, at the lighting of the Easter Candle – ‘Christ the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega; all time belongs to him, and all the ages; to him be glory and power for ever and ever.’ And the text which has above all resonated with me this year during these great three days is those words of Jesus in St John’s Gospel, ‘I, if I be lifted up, will draw all people to myself.’ What we are celebrating involves the whole human race, whether they know it or not; whether they like it or not.
 
This wonderful liturgy is about Salvation. It is about how God saves his creation, about how God is saving us. And if that is to mean anything at all, it must at least mean that there is something we need saving from. And it must also mean that there is something that we are being saved for. To judge from the Second Reading tonight, you would think that the answer to the first question – ‘what are we saved from?’ – is ‘slavery in Egypt’. That was a very important part of the answer for our Jewish forebears. But for us that is a picture which points us to a more fundamental slavery. It points us to that mysterious fault-line which seems to run deep in human history and in our personal experience. The ‘Exultet’, the Easter Proclamation at the beginning, keeps referring to it. The most famous reference is to ‘the happy fault’.  ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer’. Here it is an expression of the joyful acceptance of human weakness by those who have experienced salvation; it is a recognition of the blessing to be found even in failure, where failure is redeemed.
 
And what are we being saved for? I was struck this year by the prayer which follows our second reading, the account of the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery, and the escape across the Red Sea. We prayed , ‘May the peoples of the world become true children of Abraham, and prove worthy of the heritage of Israel.’ We prayed that all the peoples of the world will somehow ultimately be connected to this particular thread of human history and indeed religious insight. This liturgy of the Easter Vigil probably makes more use than any other of the sort of elemental religious symbolism which might link it with the human search for God in any culture and any age. Who does not connect in some way with the symbolism of fire and water? Here too, you could say, is the sacred pillar – the Easter Candle. But it is also firmly locked into that tradition of Abraham and Israel which we share very clearly with the Jews, and in a less clear but important way with Islam. And where does that tradition take us? The prophet Isaiah propels us immediately into the contemporary world, with its fascination with the nature of happiness: ‘Thus says the Lord: Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy? Pay attention, come to me; listen, and your soul will live.’ And the prophet Ezekiel reinforces it again. If Isaiah seemed to speak to the individual, Ezekiel speaks both to the human sense of alienation, and to human beings as fundamentally social beings. ‘I will gather you from foreign countries and bring you home to your own land; I will give you a new heart and a new spirit.’ What does it mean to be ‘saved’? What is ‘salvation’ about?
It is indeed about ‘happiness’, not as that is often understood, but in the deepest sense of that word; it is about fulfilment, about what ultimately satisfies the human spirit; it is about homecoming; it is about discovering that all those things are not just matters for me as an individual, but for me as an individual in a human community. And what underlies all the readings of tonight’s Vigil is that at the heart of all of this is my relationship with God. ‘You shall be my people and I will be your God.’ It is there, and there only, that ultimate salvation is to be found.
 
Ezekiel saw it, but saw it perhaps as the Jewish people continue to see it, largely in national and local terms. But how important the tradition of Israel has been for us in these last three days! On Holy Thursday, the Passover lamb; on Good Friday, the Suffering Servant. Without some of this background, it is almost impossible to understand the person and mission of Jesus. But lying far back beyond that is Abraham, ‘our father in faith’ – the one to whom God promised that in him all the nations of the world would be blessed. The human race longs for salvation, even if many fail to see that it is our relationship with God which lies at its heart. Salvation eludes us; on our own, we simply can’t get it right. And death, too; it is inevitable, but it too somehow mocks our dreams. The tradition of Abraham, the tradition of Israel, where do they point? We believe, we can even say we know, that they find their fulfilment in the One who lived that relationship with God totally within the conditions of our fallen world. We believe, we know, that in Jesus, whom we call Christ and Lord, we encounter the image of the invisible God.
 
Today we celebrate his victory of love over sin and death; today we rejoice that in him God is reconciling the world to himself; today we hear the message of the angel that he has risen from the dead and goes before us into Galilee. He goes before us into Galilee, Galilee of the Gentiles. Our risen Lord goes ahead of us to the nations. Because in Him, not only his small band of followers, but all the nations of the earth will be blessed and find salvation. ‘I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’
 
 
4th SUNDAY of LENT, Year ‘A’ (2011)

During Lent this Year – ‘Year A’ – each Sunday we have these long set-piece Gospels from the Gospel according to St John. They are particularly linked to the process of preparing those who are to be baptised at Easter, which was and remains a central focus of the season of Lent. Today’s Gospel, the story of the man born blind, links particularly with the traditional baptismal theme of ‘enlightenment’. To be baptised is to come out of the realm of darkness and blindness into the realm of light – into the light of God revealed in Jesus Christ who is ‘the light of the world’. The Gospel links to baptism, but it is the most wonderful story, a very skilfully composed drama, in its own right. So all I want to do this morning is to help you to hear it again, to listen to it again, so to speak, in slow motion. So, to begin at the beginning:
 
‘As Jesus went along, he saw a man who had been blind from his birth.’ This ‘man’ is an individual, of course, but he is also ‘Everyman’. He represents the human race which has become blind to the light of God, with that blindness which we technically call ‘Original Sin’. Faced with this man blind from birth, the disciples ask the question which rises naturally to everyone’s lips, the question ‘Why?’ ‘Why did this happen?’ ‘Whose fault was it?’ It is a question which in fact Jesus doesn’t answer. He dismisses the whole question of sin, and concentrates rather on the glory of God, and the ultimate purpose of God. ‘He was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’ We shall find the same movement in the Exultet Proclamation at the Easter Vigil: the sin of Adam becomes a ‘happy fault’, because of the wonder and glory of God’s work of redemption.
 
Then follows the somewhat cryptic saying of Jesus about having to do the Father’s work as long as day lasts. Night, he says, is coming. Surely that night the night of his Passion. At that point he can no longer be active. Now he actively teaches and heals; soon he will suffer. But in both, ultimately, he is revealed as ‘the light of the world.’
 
But to return to the story. Next Jesus works the miracle. He anoints the blind man’s eyes with clay made with spittle, and then tells him to go and wash in the Pool of Siloam. ‘Siloam’ St John tells us, means ‘Sent’. Jesus is the One ‘sent’ from the Father. In effect, the blind man is to wash in the ‘Jesus Pool’ – here too is a reference to baptism.  The man’s sight is restored. As St Paul says in the Second Reading, with a clear reference to baptism: ‘You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord.’
 
That might be the end of the story, but in our Gospel it is only the beginning. Coming into the light, baptism into Jesus Christ, brings increasing challenges. There is the challenge of puzzlement and ultimately conflict. There is also the challenge of discovering who this person Jesus is. Who was it who opened the eyes of the blind man? At the beginning the blind man simply says ‘the man called Jesus’. And he seems to have lost contact. Jesus has disappeared.
 
We then move to the theme of conflict – conflict with the Pharisees, and conflict with the group St John simply calls ‘The Jews’. It is important to see this conflict in context. The writing of this Gospel almost certainly coincides with a time when the Christian community was no longer accepted by the Jewish community as simply one strand within Judaism – a strand which believed the Messiah had come. The Christians had been thrown out of the synagogue. So we should not see this passage, or indeed St John’s Gospel as a whole, as ‘anti-Semitic’ in the modern sense.
 
However, first it is the Pharisees who are challenged to make sense of this miracle. Who, in reality, is Jesus? The argument is classic, and unresolved. On the one hand, he can’t be on the side of God, because he doesn’t keep God’s Law. On the other hand, only someone with God behind him could work such a miracle. Meanwhile the blind man, involved in this controversy, has moved on in his faith. He now speaks not simply of ‘the man Jesus’, but ‘the prophet Jesus’. He has come to recognise Jesus as a prophet of God.
 
Next, enter ‘the Jews’. They are grappling with the same issue as the Pharisees. One solution would be that the man wasn’t really blind at all. Let’s ask his parents. His parents vouch for his blindness from birth, but otherwise they don’t want to get involved. They are faithful Jews, and they don’t want to get excommunicated. So they pass the buck back to their son: ‘He is old enough, ask him’.
 
So the argument begins with the man himself. ‘Give glory to God’, say the Jews, ‘We know this man Jesus is a sinner’. ‘I don’t know about that’, the man replies, ‘but I do know that he cured my blindness.’ The argument hots up. The man takes to irony – ‘Do you want to be disciples too?’; the Jews, nettled, take to abuse. And then we get the contrast between ‘this man’ – Jesus – and Moses. Two weeks ago we had the Gospel of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain top, when Moses appeared with Elijah, speaking with Jesus. There Moses is a witness pointing forward to Jesus. But here the Jews have got stuck. They can see no further than Moses. ‘We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this man (Jesus) we don’t know where he comes from.’ The blind man repeats his earlier argument – such a miracle, such a good act, must have its origin in God. In response, the Jews call him ‘a sinner through and through’ and drive him away.
 
This is the point at which Jesus re-enters the scene. Jesus actually comes to look for the man born blind. The man born blind had first recognised Jesus as simply ‘the man’ – ‘a man’. He had come subsequently to recognise Jesus as ‘a prophet’. Now Jesus in his turn asks him a challenging question. ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ It is a title of the expected Messiah, but its meaning is not obvious. The man doesn’t say Yes or No. He asks to be further enlightened. ‘Tell me who he is so that I may believe in him.’  I suppose he expected some sort of theological presentation. What he got was something very different. ‘You are looking at him; he is speaking to you’. He found himself not with a presentation, but with a Presence. He found himself in the Real Presence of the Son of Man, of the Messiah, of the Christ. He found himself in the Real Presence of the Word of God made flesh. He found himself, as we find ourselves here today, in the presence of the Life that is the light of humankind, the light that shines in the darkness, the light which the darkness cannot overpower.  ‘You are looking at him; he is speaking to you.’ The man said, “Lord, I believe,” and worshipped him.
 
St Augustine concludes his great book ‘The City of God’ with the words ‘what is our end, but to reach the kingdom without end?’ The man said, “Lord, I believe,” and worshipped him. That is the end of this dramatic story of gradual and deepening conversion. That is the end without end. But in today’s Gospel there is a coda – a coda about judgement. Here, as elsewhere in St John’s Gospel, its is clear that judgement is the result of the True Light having come into the world. Judgement is not about God’s condemnation. There is no condemnation of those in the world who are blind; no condemnation of  those without sight. The only judgement, and it is self-inflicted, is on those who claim to see, when actually they are blind. Those who claim that what is self-evidently good is actually sinful; those who are so stuck in the conviction of their own total knowledge and total rightness that they are impervious to the light. Their guilt remains.
 
That is where today’s Gospel ends, but that should not, and cannot, be the last word. For today’s Gospel is the good news of the One who declares, ‘I am the Light of the World’, and it is a call to respond to that Light. So let us return to St Paul’s conclusion in the Second Reading:  ‘Anything exposed by the light will be illuminated, and anything illuminated turns into light. That is why it is said:
       Wake up from your sleep,
        Rise from the dead,
        And Christ will shine upon you.’
 
    

1st SUNDAY of LENT, Year ‘A’ (2011)

We begin Lent against the background of a massive natural disaster. One witness, not surprisingly said ‘It felt like the end of the world’. We begin Lent against the background of an agonising civil war in Libya, about which we seem powerless to do anything. In a past age, we might have seen the earthquake as a massive act of divine judgement. Or alternatively as a sign that there could not possibly be a loving Creator behind the inexorable forces of nature. Now we are more likely to see it as did, I believe, the Editor of ‘The Tablet’ on ‘Thought for the Day’ yesterday. I am told she made the point that a world in which natural forces were miraculously inhibited by divine intervention whenever they were likely to be destructive would be a constantly unpredictable world – a world, in fact, very difficult to live in. One cannot but admire the wonderfully calm and disciplined way in which the people of Japan seem to be dealing with this catastrophe. However it is a reminder to us all of the essential fragility of human life. I am sure that those of us who live in these islands are grateful for not living in a part of the world subject to these risks, and most of us would cope much worse than the Japanese. But as St Paul reminds us in the Second Reading, ‘death has spread through the whole human race.’ There is, in the end, no escape from this aspect of being human, wherever you live.
 
But what St Paul actually says is this: ‘Death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned’. He links death specifically to sin, to the ‘Fall of Humanity’. St Paul links death to that original disobedience to God which is depicted in our First Reading, the well-known story of Adam and Eve, the tempter serpent, and the forbidden fruit. And this link between death and sin has always been an element of traditional Christian faith. On the face of it, this is difficult to understand. Leaving aside the whole issue of the ageing process, if no one ever died, the world would long ago have become absurdly overcrowded. So it might be more appropriate to say that ‘death as we experience it’ is the result of sin. Death as we experience it is the result of our separation from God. One might imagine that in a paradisal state, in a world where we were totally open to God and the vision of God, the transition which is marked by death would have no more terrors than does going to sleep at night and waking up in the morning. In fact that is not our experience.
 
To the extent that death has lost its terror for us, it is because of the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus himself was without sin. But, as St Paul reminded us on Ash Wednesday, Jesus, the sinless one, ‘became sin for us’. Jesus shared the reality of our fallen human condition. Jesus the Son of God, Jesus the Son who was and is and ever will be perfectly one with the Father, nevertheless cried out from the Cross, ’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. But we also know that in his death he entrusted himself in faith into the Father’s hands, and we also know that that faith was not misplaced. His death was crowned with resurrection. This Lent we have once again set out on a journey of preparation for the celebration of that central Christian mystery at Easter – that central celebration of the great three days of the Easter Triduum.
 
Lent is a preparation for Easter. Lent also reflects those forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. The aspect of this which we always remember is the aspect of fasting. Hence all our attempts to ‘give things up’ during Lent. But in one sense that is a very minor aspect of this Gospel story. The heart of it, as the Opening Prayer for Ash Wednesday reminded us, is ‘the struggle against evil’. In the desert Jesus was engaged in a real spiritual battle. St Luke says that after this particular battle, the devil left Jesus ‘until the appointed time’. This surely refers to the final battle with evil, the battle of the Cross, the moment when evil was decisively defeated by love. Jesus was engaged in a real struggle with the forces of evil, and so, undoubtedly, are we, as we seek to follow Jesus.
 
We must not forget that, but at the same time there is another tradition of temptation. There the emphasis is not so much on the battle with the forces of evil. The emphasis is on testing and proving the quality of the servant of God. This is the function of Satan in the Book of Job. The issue is this. Will Job continue to bless God if he is visited with disaster? God allows Satan to afflict him in order to test and ultimately to reveal the real depth of Job’s faith.
 
Just as St Luke in his Gospel points to the link between the temptations of Jesus and the Cross, so the testing of Jesus in the wilderness corresponds to that ultimate test of the Cross. The first test is the temptation to satisfy physical need without reference to God. In his Passion, Jesus shrank from the physical experience of the Cross, but in his agony in Gethsemane spoke that great word ‘Nevertheless’. ‘Nevertheless, Father, not my will but yours be done.’ ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ God comes first; God is central; all else finds its place in relation to God.
 
Similarly, the temptation to throw himself down from the height of the Temple is about forcing the Father’s hand – testing the Father, not trusting the Father. In his Passion, Jesus could have called for the assistance of legions of angels. In fact he had to walk the way of faith. In the darkness of death he simply says, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’.
 
And finally there is the temptation to worldly power. This is the temptation we see all around us. We see it in Gaddafi and those around him. We see in those who have tried in our own and every country to play the game of wealth and power. We see all around us the evil effects and the moral confusion that result. The way of the Cross is the absolute opposite of that. It is the way of total vulnerability; it is the way of apparent weakness and poverty; it is the way in which the only power is love - love and faith; love, and trust in the love which is the very nature of God, the love which ‘moves the sun and the other stars’.
 
St Paul in today’s Second Reading has, you might say, some depressing things to say about the human condition. All he sees, it would seem, is sin and death. But the central message of St Paul is the opposite of depressing. ‘Adam prefigured the One to come.’ In the great proclamation which opens the Easter Vigil, the Fall of Adam is seen as a ‘happy fault’. Similarly, St Paul is almost ecstatic about the abundant free gift of God’s grace which comes to us in Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, the one in whom we see the beginning of the re-creation of the human race. ‘As by old Adam’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of the new Adam, so by the obedience of Jesus – by his sacrifice of obedient love offered throughout his life but supremely on the Cross – so by the obedience of Jesus many will be made righteous.’
 
Right here in this Mass, that overwhelming, abundant free gift is made present for us and for all humanity. As we shall pray in a moment, ‘Lord, may this sacrifice, which has made our peace with you, advance the peace and salvation of all the world.’  In the face of natural catastrophe, in the face of the evil exploitation of worldly power, we must do what we can. But in our prayer here at Mass, even with our helplessness, we are taken up into a prayer and an offering which embraces all the victims of these events, and not only the victims. ‘Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation’. Jesus was able to pray that prayer at the Supper on the evening before his crucifixion. Even in the midst of the terrible events we are witnessing, it can be our prayer as well.
   
 
9th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

For the last six Sundays we have been hearing what is often called ‘The Sermon on the Mount’. Today’s Gospel is its conclusion. The First Reading today is also a conclusion – the conclusion of the giving of the Old Testament Law by Moses. In St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is presented as the New Moses. So in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them.’ And over these past weeks we have heard Jesus taking the Old Testament Law and interpreting it in a deeper sense. It is about how we behave in the outside world, it is about avoiding certain actions, but it is also about attitudes which tend in the direction of those attitudes; it is also about what goes on in the heart. Behind the Sermon on the Mount is a concern not just with how we can rub along together in the human community, but with the profound matter of the deeper healing of humanity, the restoration of the image of God in us, our re-creation in the context of God’s Kingdom, both as individuals and at the same time as a community.
 
But why do we need the Law of Moses, why do we need the Ten Commandments at all? Why do we need Jesus the New Moses to build his deeper interpretation on them? In one sense the answer is obvious. In our world, we need some moral guidelines. But in the Second Reading St Paul goes behind that obvious answer, and tells us that the reason is that ‘both Jew and pagan have sinned – all humanity has sinned - and forfeited God’s glory.’  God created us in God’s image; God created us to live in a conscious and loving relationship with him. That is the foundational rock on which God built the human race. And, as is perfectly obvious, we have abandoned that foundation. That is what the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden is all about – the story of what we call ‘the Fall of humanity’. It is perfectly obvious, as we look at the history of the human race, as we look at the world in which we live, that we have abandoned that foundational rock of loving and intimate relationship with God. In terms of the image in today’s Gospel, we have preferred to build on shifting sand. The Gospel today presents us with two alternatives. We can either respond to the words of Jesus and act on them, and be founded on rock, or we can fail to respond to them, and remain in the quicksand. Similarly, and equally dramatically, Moses in the First Reading sets before the Old Testament people of God two ways. If you keep the commandments of God, if you walk in the way God has marked out for you, you will be blessed. If you abandon this way, and go after other gods, you will be cursed.
 
In the Ten Commandments, God describes himself as a ‘jealous God’. And it is possible to hear this offer of blessing or curse as an act of simple human jealousy; God tying us to God’s apron strings; God refusing to give us freedom. But of course it isn’t that. The reality is that God has given us freedom. He has indeed given humanity the freedom to get into the mess that we have got ourselves into. God doesn’t curse us out of vindictive jealously. God’s only concern is that we should be blessed. God has created us out of love to live in love with him and with our neighbour. If we choose to abandon that relationship for which we have been created, that relationship which at the deepest level is natural for us, because we think we can find a better way of being human than the way God has mapped out for us, then in fact we curse ourselves. Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden are described as hiding from God. To hide from God goes against what is deepest in our nature. The curse is not the curse of an angry and jealous God. The jealousy of God is not the vindictive jealousy we sadly sometimes experience in human relationships. The jealousy of God is that passionate love which longs for us to return and to receive his blessing. It is the passionate love of God who knows what we are made for and longs to save us from ourselves.
 
 ‘God’s justice was made known through the Law and the prophets’, says St Paul in today’s Second Reading. God’s justice was made known through Moses and the Ten Commandments; God’s justice was made known through all those Old Testament prophets who sought to recall God’s special, chosen people to faithfulness to God. It would be easy to understand God’s justice as God blessing the good and cursing the bad. That, in an obvious human sense, would be ‘just’. But God’s justice is not quite like that. The whole of Scripture, the whole Bible, makes clear that it matters deeply how we live, how we behave. But the underlying story of God’s justice is not simply the story of God passing judgement on us. The whole underlying story of God’s justice in Holy Scripture is the story of God seeking to save us; to save us from the power of evil, to save us from ourselves. With Noah and the flood it is the story of God promising not to destroy his creation whatever may have gone wrong with it. With Abraham it is the promise of God that all nations will ultimately be blessed. With Moses it is about the special relationship of God with his chosen people Israel – the Jewish people through whom his ultimate saving action in Jesus Christ was prepared.
 
‘Both Jew and pagan have sinned and forfeited God’s glory’ says St Paul. The ancient story of Noah’s ark and the rainbow contained the promise that God would not destroy his creation. Now we know that Jew and pagan, Jew and Gentile, in fact all humanity, are in the same boat. And God’s justice wants all people to be saved. As the flood receded, Noah’s ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. The clear message of today’s Scriptures is that there is one and only one rock of salvation on which humanity can come to rest, and that is the rock of Jesus Christ. Every other way of salvation will in the end prove to be no more than shifting sand.
 
God’s justice has always sought the salvation of the whole human race. A vital stage in that process was the giving of the law to Moses. A vital stage was the gradual training of a special people in the ways of God, in the truth of God. But that process came to an end with the coming of Jesus Christ. After all that necessary preparation, with all the twists and turns of failure and faithfulness involved, God has in these last days spoken to us in the person of his Son. In Jesus, the Son of God but also the Son of Man, the image of God in our humanity has been restored. In Jesus Christ there is a new creation. The gift of faith is the gift of being linked, united, to that re-creation of humanity in Jesus Christ. And, as St Paul says, this is open to all people without distinction. At the heart of that re-creation is that perfect offering of Jesus which is the Cross – that offering of himself in love and forgiveness which alone could draw the sting of sin and evil, and which was crowned and vindicated by his resurrection from the dead. That gift of faith is inaugurated for us in our baptism, and constantly renewed through our sharing in the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, in the Mass. That gift of faith is renewed in us through his Body given for us, his Blood shed for us, his very Life shared with us. By his grace, may we never depart from that one true rock; that one true rock upon which we have all been founded.  
 
 
 
7th SUNDAY of Year A (2011)

‘Offer the wicked man no resistance.’ ‘Love your enemies.’ That is what we heard in the Gospel today. Last week Jesus was speaking about the commandment ‘You must not kill’. As a result, last week after Mass I was challenged with  a question which is even more closely related to the Gospel for today. I was being asked how anyone who followed the teaching of Jesus could possibly countenance war and violence. Indeed how could the Church, if it was going to be true to the teaching of her Lord, take any position except that of full-blown pacifism. ‘Offer the wicked man no resistance.’
 
That is the teaching of Jesus, building on the law of the Old Testament ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. That Old Testament teaching sounds like a simple encouragement to taking revenge for injury. In fact I believe that the point of it was not to encourage vengeance, but to limit it. ‘Yes, pay your enemy back, but don’t do more to him than he has done to you.’ So it was some kind of moral advance. But the teaching of Jesus takes the whole thing onto a different plane. ‘You have learnt how it was said: you must love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but I say ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’
 
The First Reading from Leviticus about love of brother and neighbour includes the well-known phrase ‘you must love your neighbour as yourself’. Jesus himself takes up this commandment, and links it with the commandment to love God with our whole heart, to create a summary of the whole Law of God. But in the Leviticus passage ‘neighbour’ seems only to refer to a brother, or to ‘the children of your people’. It certainly doesn’t cover enemies. ‘Who is my neighbour? What are the limits?’ – that was, after all, one of the questions which, in another context, Jesus was asked.
 
And the answer of Jesus is that there are in fact no limits. Your neighbour includes your enemy; your neighbour includes your persecutor. And why am I asked to love with this totally inclusive love? The answer Jesus gives is that in this way you mirror the love of God. In this way you will be children of your Father in heaven. This love which embraces everyone mirrors the love of God. That is the teaching of Jesus. But it is also embodied in the life of Jesus; it is embodied in his Passion and on the Cross. It was in fact by offering  on the cross no resistance to wickedness except the resistance of love that the sting of the evil was drawn. This is what St Paul refers to as ‘the foolishness of God which is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God which is stronger than human strength’. (1 Cor.1:25).
 
At the heart of our faith, at the heart of the Gospel, is a love which the power of evil simply cannot overcome. Violent resistance only breeds more violence. To meet the violence of evil with love is to render that evil powerless. There is no more it can do. So my questioner last week must surely have been right. The only truly Christ-like response to war and violence must be the pacifist response. And rightly understood, that does not mean simply stepping aside from the violence. It means opposing the violence, but doing so in a non-violent and indeed in a loving manner. It means, in effect, sitting down in front of the tank which is threatening to run you over. As such it a heroic stance, and a remarkable witness to the Gospel.
 
But it has to be said that over the centuries the Church has also countenanced what has been called ‘a just war’. She has always encouraged the making of peace by every reasonable means, but has not excluded or condemned the opposing of criminal aggression by the use of force in self-defence.  For our world is corrupted by sin and evil. We are not in fact the reasonable beings God intended us to be. Our redemption is not complete; the kingdom of Heaven has not fully arrived. So in the light of this, she also recognises the right of self-defence in the face of such criminal aggression, whether by states or individuals.  Such use of force is seen not as good in itself, but as the lesser of two evils. It has also been traditionally hedged about with a number of limitations. Not only must it be used only in self-defence, but the force must be in proportion to the aggression. It is, of course, along this line that the thinking about policies of nuclear deterrence becomes so difficult.
 
Some will see this as a terrible capitulation to the values of the world. But perhaps one could also look at it as a realistic approach to the fact that as Christians we live in two worlds; two worlds which are closely entwined but also separable. Today’s Second Reading is in fact exactly about these two worlds. One is the ordinary human world of every day, in which we exercise, if we are lucky, what is sometimes called ‘worldly wisdom’. At its lowest, worldly wisdom makes sure that we are in the right place at the right time, and don’t pick a quarrel or get run over by a bus on the way. At its highest, we are trying to make the most just and charitable decisions we can in a twisted world.
 
The other world is the new creation, the new world, which has come into being through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the new world in which God reigns – in which everything will, in the end, be subject to God. This world has begun to exist already in Jesus Christ, and indeed, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the Church which is his Body. ‘Didn’t you realise’, says St Paul, ‘that you are God’s temple and that the Spirit of God is living among you?’ Insofar as we are part of this new world, we must live by the values of that new world – that world of total self-giving, that world of unstinted love and generosity. And we must seek to embody those values as far as we can in our life within the Christian community especially, but also in our everyday living generally. But there are points, and not only in relation to war and violence, when we have to recognise the limitations of our fallen world. One that frequently comes my way is illustrated by the injunction of Jesus in the Gospel, ‘Give to anyone who asks…’. However generous I may wish to be, a measure of worldly wisdom is required when encountering the demands of certain people who knock at my door.
 
Earlier, I quoted St Paul’s words, ‘The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom’. Today, St Paul says, ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.’ Much of our lives are taken up with simply trying to get along from day to day in a world where not only inanimate objects but difficult and demanding fellow-creatures test our worldly wisdom. We have in the reading a big hint that personality difficulties were prominent in the Corinthian church. But all that, demanding as it may be, pales into insignificance and can be counted as foolishness, in the light of our share in the other world in which we already participate; our share in the new creation into which we are rooted, not least through the Mass. Here we know that whatever the trials and tribulations of life, the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality shines out in those wonderful words of St Paul: ‘all things are yours, the world, life and death, the present and the future, all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.’  
 
 
5th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’ (2011)

This Sunday morning at Our Lady of the Rosary four children will be beginning their preparation for First Holy Communion. Three others from Holy Rood are being prepared through their school. Last Sunday the Confirmation Preparation course began in our Pastoral Area, and seven children from the parish are taking part in that. Both First Holy Communion and Confirmation are important milestones on the journey of life in the Catholic Church. In both cases, when the great day comes, they are moments of joy and celebration not just for the candidates and their families, but for the whole parish community. People often talk about young people as ‘the future of the Church’. Those of us who have been part of the worshipping community for sixty years or so hope that we are some sort of encouragement to the young. But it is certain that the presence of young people who are on these important stages of their Christian journey is a great encouragement to us. And we pray that sixty years on, when we have moved on, they will still be here. Well, if not exactly here, perhaps, but at least we pray that they will be lively and committed members of the Church of Jesus Christ somewhere in the world.   We all very much hope and pray that these young people will continue on the journey as disciples of Jesus Christ throughout their lives. And having just listened to this Sunday’s Gospel, in that hope and that prayer we might want to echo the words of Jesus to his disciples: ‘You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.’
 
‘You are the salt of earth; you are the light of the world.’ Those are, when you come to think of it, pretty amazing words. I wonder what Jesus really meant by them? Of course ‘the salt of the earth’ has become a standard English proverbial phrase. I can think of lots of people within this parish of whom I could very happily say ‘he (or she) is the salt of the earth’. They are the kind of people who are unselfish and honest; who are generous and helpful; who see the jobs that need doing and get on and do them. I can think of lots of people in the parish like that, but I can also think of lots of people who have nothing to do with the Church who are in those terms ‘the salt of the earth.’
 
Jesus also says to his disciples, ‘You are the light of the world.’ Unlike the saying about salt, that has not become a proverb in quite the same way. But today’s First Reading was from the prophet Isaiah. You will be aware that there is always a link between the Gospel and the First Reading, so it is always a good idea to look out for the connection. And in this case ‘light’ is the connection. ‘Your light will shine like the dawn’, says Isaiah; ‘Your light will rise in the darkness.’ And according to Isaiah, what is it that makes us shine like lights in the darkness? ‘Share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor; clothe the naked; don’t stir up quarrels; bring relief to the oppressed.’ So you could say that is very much the same as being ‘salt of the earth’.
 
About all that I want to say two things. First, if those where the real priorities of most people in our country, it would be a very different place. In the world at large there is a great deal of selfishness and greed, and it doesn’t always by-pass those who are Christian. (Salt, as Jesus says, can lose its saltiness; light can grow dim or be hidden.) But those things which Isaiah says make light shine are not confined to Christians. There are salty people outside the Church, and there a people who are beacons of light outside the Church.
 
Secondly, that is true, but it is also true that centuries of Christian history in this country have had a huge impact on the values of people generally, even if that impact is now in decline. And it is still true in our own day that Christians have been at the forefront of many efforts against poverty and homelessness, and in their concern for the plight of the wider world. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus says, ‘Your light must shine in people’s sight, so that seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in heaven.’ There, Jesus seems to speak of ‘light’ in terms of ‘good works’.  If Christian communities are still valued in our secular society it is surely because of this. They are seen as a nurseries of people who do ‘good works’ – in current terms, people who make a serious contribution to ‘the Big Society’.
 
We all hope and pray that those who are now beginning their preparation for First Holy Communion or for Confirmation will remain throughout their lives in the communion of the Church. We hope that in this environment they will develop as people who in Isaiah’s terms will be ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘light of the world’. We hope that with the influence of what we call ‘Christian values’ they will grow up unselfish and generous and public-spirited; that they will make a real contribution to society.
 
But is that our central hope, our deepest prayer? Good as it is, is that what Jesus is really speaking about in the Gospel? I don’t think so. The key to the Gospel is, I believe, in those final words. ‘Your light must shine in people’s sight, so that seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in heaven.’ All the good works are indeed good works, but if light shines through them, the purpose of that light is to contribute to the praise of God.  It is to give glory to God. The Church exists, and we exist within the Church, to give glory to God.
 
I said earlier that ‘salt of the earth’ is now a proverb, but ‘the light of the world’ is rather different. In the Gospel today, Jesus says to us, ‘You are the light of the world.’ But that surely instantly reminds us of another Gospel, where Jesus says, ‘I am the Light of the World’. (Indeed the connection is made in the Alleluia verse before the Gospel.) In the Second Reading, St Paul says, ‘the only knowledge I claimed to have was about Jesus, and only about him as the crucified Christ.’ The Church exists not to contribute good works to the Big Society, but primarily to proclaim Jesus as the Light of the World. The Church exists not to prop up a set of values that have proved useful for civilised living, but primarily because in Jesus Christ the God who made everything that is, visible and invisible, has definitively made himself known as Love. The Church – ‘Mother Church’ as we sometimes say – the Church is worth belonging to and sticking with, because in her and through her we have communion with God; God who has come down to our level in Jesus, who shared our humanity, and, amazingly, wants us to share his Life. The Church is worth belonging to and sticking with because she is the Church of Jesus, the crucified Christ. She is the Church of the One who confronted all the evil, the sin, the darkness, the tragedy of our world on the cross; she is the Church of the One who came through triumphant in his resurrection, and who shares with us his Holy Spirit.  The Church is worth belonging to and sticking with, because in and through her, in and through her Lord Jesus Christ, we discover that our fullest happiness is to be found in a life which does indeed bring light to the world, because it is a life which in union with Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, gives glory and praise to our Father who is in heaven.   
      
 
3rd SUNDAY of YEAR ‘A’

There are two events which have been uppermost in my consciousness over the past few days. One is the Healing Mission which has been taking place in our parish. The other is the inauguration of this mysterious new entity within the Catholic Church, ‘The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham’. I’m sure that many of you are puzzled by it, and I could spend the whole of this homily trying to explain it. Briefly, it is the means devised by Pope Benedict by which groups of Anglicans, as opposed to individual Anglicans, can come into full communion with the Catholic Church. It was inaugurated a week ago, when three former Anglican bishops were ordained as Catholic priests in Westminster Cathedral. It touches us particularly because one of them, Fr Andrew Burnham, actually lives at present in this parish, and will continue to live within our Pastoral Area. He is a priest of the Ordinariate, not a priest of the Portsmouth Diocese, but he is able to help within our Pastoral Area, and will be celebrating some of the Masses in the parish in the coming week. The Ordinariate is not only a strange and unfamiliar word, it really is something quite new, so it is only possible to say it is ‘a bit like’ this or that. Fr Andrew’s status, you could say, is a bit like that of the Carmelites or Jesuits who come to help us occasionally. They are not priests of the diocese, they are priests of their religious order, but they are priests of the Catholic Church and are therefore able to minister, with appropriate permission, within our diocese and parish.
 
Most of you are probably more conscious at this moment of the Healing Mission  rather than the Ordinariate. But this weekend is also the weekend which falls within the Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians. Each year we are asked to pray not just that Christians will be nice to each other, which generally they already are. We are asked to pray for the visible unity of the Church as the Body of Christ. This matters, because only so can the Church truly be a sign of the Gospel of Christ. As St John says, Jesus died ‘not for one nation only, but to gather together into one the scattered children of God.’(John 11.52) To be fully true to its calling, the Church needs to be a visible sign of God’s purpose to bring into the unity of his Kingdom the whole of humanity. So the Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians is a serious business. I can truly say that it was centrally that concern for the visible unity of the Body of Christ which led me to seek to come into full communion with the Catholic Church and with the successor of Peter. I have no doubt at all that this is the central concern of those who have joined, or are seeking to join, the ‘Ordinariate of  Our Lady of Walsingham’.
 
So this Sunday I am particularly conscious, and some at least of you will be particularly conscious, of two events which may seem miles apart. And in that context we have heard, in effect, two passages of Scripture. As always on Sunday, of course, we have heard three. But somewhat unusually, the Gospel today not only links with the First Reading from the Old Testament, but actually repeats it. And what a beautiful passage, what a familiar passage it is. Traditionally, the Christmas season used to continue until Candlemas on February 2nd. So in a sense we are still basking in the light of the Epiphany. Today’s Gospel, like the Feast of the Epiphany, is about the manifestation of Christ to the nations. So it is absolutely right that when we hear those thrilling words of Isaiah repeated again in the Gospel, it should give us a renewed taste of Christmas. ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who dwell in the land and shadow of death a light has dawned’. The Gospel message is that the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God, is close at hand. ‘The true light, the light that enlightens everyone, is coming into the world’.
 
In the First Reading, the prophet Isaiah is concerned about oppression of his people by a foreign power. He has a vision of this slavery being ended by the intervention of God. ‘The day of Midian’ was the day when the victory was quite clearly an act of God. God gave Gideon with a tiny band of followers the victory over a great army. The darkness in which the people walked was the darkness of slavery and oppression. The reign of God means liberation. It means the true freedom and dignity of all within the human community – that freedom and dignity within the common good for which God created us.
 
The reign of God also means healing. ‘Jesus went around the whole of Galilee teaching and proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people.’ The reign of God which Jesus proclaims means the transformation of the life of the human community, but it also means the transformation of the inner life of every individual. The light of Christ has shone to banish the darkness which envelops our social relationships; the light of Christ has shone to penetrate the darkness of every human heart, and to restore in us the image of God in which each one of us is created. ‘A land of deep shadow’: how wonderfully that little phrase encapsulates both the reality of our present society, and my awareness of some aspects, at least, of my inner being – the hurts and the pains that I carry; the things which, sometimes by my choice, sometimes not, continue to separate me from God. ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ In Jesus Christ, the light has come into the world, and the darkness has not, and never will, overcome it.
 
That might be, and perhaps should be, the place to end. But this Sunday we have been given a Second reading from St Paul which is extraordinarily relevant to both the themes of this week – the Unity of Christians and the Healing Mission. In Corinth, the sin of division is creeping into the church. ‘Real Christians do it Paul’s way’. ‘No, real Christians follow Apollos.’ Part of this is about the proper God-given diversity of humanity, which we should celebrate. Part of it, the bit that brings about separation, is the work of the devil. The worm of evil gets into the Church very easily. The Anglican Ordinariate is at heart about celebrating diversity within the Church, but holding firmly to the visible unity of the Church through communion with the successor of St Peter.
 
The Healing Mission has been about letting the light of Christ shine into some of the dark places of our individual lives. It has had its own particular distinctive style and emphasis. And its blessings have been obvious. They would hate it, but it would be easy for those who have been touched by it to say ‘I am for Fr Laurence and Pauline’. ‘This is the real thing.’ The powers of evil will be trying this on, as they did in Corinth. What does St Paul do? He goes to the heart of the matter. He goes to the one sure place where the powers of evil, the ruler of the darkness of this world, was finally and decisively defeated. He goes to the Cross. The heart of the Good News is the mystery of Christ crucified – Christ crucified and risen. That is the mystery which is made present for us at the heart of every Mass. This is the true heart and centre of our faith; this is the place where our unity is founded. This is where the light of God’s love is ultimately seen to be inextinguishable. It is here that we can with absolute security say with the Psalmist,  ‘Hope in Him, hold firm and take heart. Hope in the Lord.’     
 
FEAST of the EPIPHANY (2011)

I wonder how many of you have been whiling away the hours over Christmas with one of those giant quizzes? If there had been a question about the location of the Vatican Observatory, would you have been able to answer it? It seems there are two possible correct answers. One is the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. I discovered the other by reading the new monthly magazine produced by our Bishops’ Conference – ‘Faith Today’.The December issue had an article on the Star which the Magi followed. It was written by Fr Christopher Corbally, who works at the Vatican Observatory in Arizona. So ‘Arizona’ should get full marks too.
 
As you may imagine, it was not an article which gave the final answer to that vexed question about what the Magi saw and when they saw it. But it came down fairly heavily in favour not of one star, nor of a comet, but of a conjunction of planets. There were a number of such meetings of planets in the same part of the sky around the time of the birth of Jesus. Of course, despite BC and AD, we can’t actually be sure precisely in which year Jesus was born. So there are several options. One of the reasons for favouring a conjunction of planets is that the Magi would have been able to calculate it before it happened. It seems that a conjunction of planets was also the option favoured in the recent BBC 1 television series on the Nativity. But in that re-telling of the story not only did the Wise Men play a hugely important part, but the star was much more than just a signpost.
 
There was the moment of brilliant light which signalled the birth. But there were also constant reminders as the story unfolded that this Nativity was an event of cosmic significance. Stars and planets kept appearing. The whole universe was somehow caught up in it. And this is not just fanciful. It is one of the great Scriptural themes during Christmastide. ‘Through the Word all things came to be.’ ‘The Son of God sustains the universe by his powerful command’. We heard those two scriptural texts on Christmas morning. And a couple of days ago in the Office of Readings there was that great assertion of St Paul in his Letter to the Colossians, ‘Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God… God created the whole universe through him and for him.’ On Christmas Day we tend to focus on the domestic aspects of the birth of Jesus. The Feast of the Epiphany invites us to raise our vision far higher. We are celebrating an almost invisible event in a tiny corner of a tiny planet. But it is nevertheless an event of cosmic, of universal, significance.
 
This is, you might say, a concept so grand that you or I can’t begin to envisage it. And you might also feel that it was rather easier for St Paul to make grand claims about the universe. It may have been very large in his eyes, but we now know that it is many, many times larger than St Paul could ever have conceived. And our own place within it now seems correspondingly tiny. We are not, as earthlings, obviously at the centre of the universe. In fact we easily appear to be pretty marginal. I suspect that this is one of the things which makes belief harder now than once it was. It might therefore help to make two points.
 
The first was made many years ago by the Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple. He said somewhere, ‘I am greater than the stars, for I know that they are up there, but they do not know that I am down here.’
It is our consciousness which makes us aware of the size of the universe. but the fact that we are aware, that we can even begin to comprehend it, does in fact significantly change the perspective. The Word became flesh, and lived among us. God in Jesus has spoken his definitive Word, has communicated God’s meaning to us.  That awareness, that ability to ask questions about what it all might mean, that ability to communicate, can pretty clearly be seen as something greater than sheer size.  We should not too easily assume that just because the universe is unimaginably vast, it is therefore at its origin cold and impersonal. Behind it lies that warmth of Love which is able to share our human flesh.
 
The second point is extremely speculative, but not, I think, necessarily heretical. There is much speculation that in so vast a universe there could be other planets able to sustain intelligent life. Whether we will ever discover that such life exists is another matter. But if it does, then it is part of God’s creation, part of God’s universe. If those beings, however different they may be from us, are made in the image of God; if, that is, they have been created with the capacity to respond freely to God and to share in the life of God, then it would be perfectly possible for there to be another Incarnation in that context. The same Word of God, the unique Word of God who was and is and ever will be with the Father, and One with the Father – the same Word of God could share the nature of those other beings too. And that would not in any way undermine the unique significance of the birth of Jesus within our immediate world. Nor would it undermine the understanding of that birth as an event of cosmic significance, a revelation of the One beloved Son and Word of God, who sustains the whole universe by his powerful command.
 
So we are not absolutely committed, I think, to understanding our little planet as the absolute centre of God’s purpose for the whole of this unimaginably vast and complex universe. But, despite its tinyness and its apparent insignificance, it may indeed be the centre of the whole project. It is, after all, another central and recurring theme of Christmas in particular, but also of our whole tradition of faith, that God uses what is small, lowly and of no account to confound what is apparently great and powerful.
 
If there is one group in the Christmas story, apart from the Holy Family itself, which emphasises God’s working through what is little and marginal, it is the shepherds. They must have been Jews, if short on religious observance. They must have been among ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ for which Jesus declared later that he came. I have focussed today entirely on one aspect of the story of the Magi which stands at the heart of this Feast. I have focussed entirely on the Star as a pointer to the cosmic significance of the birth of Jesus. It is surely important, particularly in our own day, to reflect on our faith against that background. But we do so not as a congregation of Jews, but mostly, at least, of Gentiles. And the immediate cause of our rejoicing today is something we have long taken for granted, but for which we should never cease to be thankful. God’s call, God’s promises are through Jesus Christ open to all humanity without distinction. As St Paul tells us so triumphantly in the Second Reading, there is in Christ one inheritance, one body, one promise made through the Gospel to all people. There is One God whose Word, revealed in Christ and by the Spirit, is all-embracing Love. And that love enfolds one humanity and one universe; it draws us to worship. ‘Everyone in Sheba will come…’. ‘Everyone will come, bringing gold and incense, and singing the praise of the Lord.’ 
 
 
CHRISTMAS DAY 2010

‘One man can’t change the world.’ That was one of the lines imprinted on my mind from the four-part television series ‘The Nativity’ which has been shown on BBC1 each evening this week. ‘One man can’t change the world.’ It was said by an elderly shepherd to the young shepherd called Thomas, as they sat round the fire, watching their flocks by night. This Thomas is not mentioned in the Bible. He is the invention of the script-writer of the series. And he appears throughout – rather puzzlingly at first. He’s obviously a shepherd, so we know where he is going to fit in eventually. But earlier we see him caring for his sick wife, and being assaulted by those who are collecting taxes on behalf of the Roman Emperor. He is poor. He is struggling. He is extremely angry with the oppressive forces of the Roman Empire. Eventually indeed, in desperation, he goes out with a knife; he resorts to violence to rob a Roman soldier. He is a Jew. When we first meet him, he believes that the Messiah will come – the Christ. He begins by believing that God will send the Messiah to lead a violent and victorious revolt against the power of the Roman Empire. When he joins the other shepherds round the fire on the hillside, he is in despair. He has given up believing in God at all. It as at that point that an elderly shepherd says to him, ‘One man can’t change the world’. The old man says, in effect, ‘It’s no good fighting the system. Just accept it, with all its injustice.’ ‘One man can’t change the world.’
 
At Mass on Christmas Day, we don’t hear the story of the shepherds. That was read last night at the Mass of Midnight. But we all know about them, watching their flocks by night. And we know about the appearance of the angels, and their song ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ – Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.’ But in this television series, we don’t hear those familiar words. Instead, the angel Gabriel comes right up close to Thomas the shepherd, and says to him ‘this Child has been born for people like you.’ The shepherds go to Bethlehem to greet the Child, and we see Thomas, who was so full of anger and despair,
kneeling down and kissing the baby’s tiny foot.
 
‘One man can’t change the world.’ The old shepherd was certainly right that the young shepherd Thomas couldn’t change the world on his own. But there have been individuals in history who could be said to have changed the world. The Roman Emperor Augustus for one. Or what about Karl Marx? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? These individuals had, for a time, a huge impact on human history, but did they fundamentally change the world? Or the prophet Mohammed? He lived six hundred years after the birth of Jesus, and we are very conscious of his influence in the world of our own day. Some of that influence is very good, for example the tradition of regular prayer, the obligation to care for the poor. Some of that influence is very good, but by no means all. He is also clearly taken by some as the inspiration for acts of intolerance and violence which represent the worst in human nature; acts which certainly do not change the world for the better.
 
‘One man can’t change the world.’ Yet when Thomas the shepherd knelt to kiss the tiny foot of the Child in Bethlehem, he knew, perhaps, deep inside that here was the One who really could, and would, change the world. Thomas, of course, is just a character imagined by a script-writer. But the Child born in Bethlehem is not just part of a story, however wonderful. This Child is part of history. So much so, in fact, that we date all the happenings of history with reference to his birth.
 
We used to talk, and some of us still do, about the years ‘BC’ – before Christ, before the birth of Jesus. We used to talk, and some of us still do, about the years ‘AD’, which stands for ‘Anno Domini’ ‘in the year of Our Lord’. All of us now count the years starting from the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. So this is  2010 AD – two thousand and ten years after the birth of this Child; this Child whom we believe is not just a remarkable child, but the Word of God himself who has taken our flesh, our humanity, in the womb of Mary. He is the one to whom all time belongs.  We start counting from his birth, because his birth was a moment of new beginning for the whole human race. It was the beginning of God’s making his world new. There are those who wish to distance themselves from the wonder of the birth of Jesus; who prefer to refer to the time since that birth as ‘The Common Era’. But the fact remains that the birth which we celebrate today is the hinge of history. Practically all over the world, whatever words we use, we measure time from that moment.
 
‘One man cannot change the world.’ Not just one man, but all humanity put together, on its own, cannot change or save the world.  But we believe that in Jesus God himself has come to share our humanity; in Jesus, within our humanity, God himself is making a new beginning. This Child is the Saviour, the one who really will change the world. Yet it may well seem that even since the birth of Jesus the world has not changed much. War and violence, greed and selfishness, oppression and abuse of power are still rampant. Human beings still do terrible things to each other. There is much about the world that is good and beautiful, but there is also a terrible darkness. And what we celebrate today is not a sudden violent intervention by God to put everything right. What we celebrate is a light, a very tiny light, shining in the darkness. God enters our world to save it from within; he enters it with the utter vulnerability of a baby, and there reveals that light which is the light of love. That light seems as delicate and vulnerable as the little foot kissed by Thomas the shepherd. But because it is the true light of the true and living God, it is a light which in fact no darkness can overpower. The continuing story of the life of this Child, the life of this Man, is a story of the shining of that light of love. ‘He is the radiant light of God’s glory’, as we heard in our Second Reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. As that story continues, it becomes the story of the darkness which seeks to put out that delicate light of love, and which seemed to succeed in doing so on the Cross. Love was totally vulnerable in that child; love was totally vulnerable on the Cross. And it is that vulnerability of love which we remember at every Mass. We celebrate today the vulnerable love of that birth; we proclaim the vulnerable love of that death. And we celebrate the victory of that love – for we remember and celebrate not just birth and death but also resurrection. ‘Lord, by your birth, by your cross, by your resurrection, you have set us free; you are the Saviour of the world.’ 
 
 
3rd SUNDAY of ADVENT (2010)

 John the Baptist was a key figure in last week’s Gospel; this week we hear about him again. Last week he was preparing the way of the Lord; this week we hear Jesus himself speaking about his role  - the role of John the Baptist as the ‘forerunner’. He is the one who prepares the way for Jesus; John is not the Messiah, John is not ‘the one who is to come’. In that sense he belongs to the time before Jesus; he belongs as it were to the Old Testament. In fact he is the bridge between the Old Testament and the New. It is not in John the Baptist that the Kingdom of God is embodied, but in Jesus himself. And yet John the Baptist is the last and the greatest pointer to Jesus. Jesus is the Redeemer, the Saviour, the One in whom our fallen humanity is re-created and renewed. Obviously John the Baptist himself ultimately shares in that redemption and renewal, he is not excluded from the Kingdom of God. But seen simply in his role of the forerunner, it is possible to say, as Jesus does in the Gospel, that ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is.’ Every one of us who has been baptised and confirmed, every one of us who has been initiated into the Body of Christ, is in an important sense, by that very fact, ‘greater than John the Baptist’.
 
But there is another aspect of today’s Gospel which might seem puzzling. John the Baptist in prison sends a message to Jesus, asking whether he is in fact the coming Messiah. This may have led you to wonder about an earlier incident – the Baptism of Jesus. If John the Baptist had in fact baptised Jesus, wouldn’t he have known that he was indeed the Messiah? So what is going on here?
 
One way of looking at it might be this. Only last week we heard about John’s preaching. He was telling people to be ready for a really dramatic intervention by God. To get ready for a baptism of fire, for an axe laid to the root of the tree. John is now in prison. Things are not going well for him. And he must be having plenty of time to think. At his baptism, it clearly appeared that Jesus was the awaited Messiah. But things don’t seem to be working out quite as John expected. Where is the dramatic intervention? Where is the baptism of fire? Where is the axe laid to the root of the tree? If Jesus is indeed the Messiah, he is not quite the Messiah that John was expecting.
 
And how does Jesus respond to this enquiry? He simply tells the disciples of John to report to him what they see and hear. ‘The blind see, the lame walk…’. What are the signs of the coming of God? Isaiah gave them to us in the First Reading. ‘Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unsealed; then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy.’ ‘And’, says Jesus, ‘happy, blessed, is the person who does not lose faith in me.’
 
John the Baptist was in danger of losing faith, because things were not working out as he had expected. He was having a hard time, and the dramatic wrapping up of everything in one great, final act of God has not occurred as he had hoped. In fact, as we know, those healing signs which Jesus worked, those miracles which reflected the prophecy of Isaiah, were indeed the signs of the coming of God.  But they were signs of a God who would not bring about the judgement and redemption of the world by some instant cataclysm, but by walking the way of suffering and death. In fact, as we believe, that path of suffering and death was the way in which God confronted and continues to confront the sinfulness of humanity, and our estrangement from God’s love. It is the way in which God chose, and chooses, to confront the evil of the world in all its forms, and to reveal his triumph over it, his triumph in the mysterious glory of the resurrection.
 
It is that triumph which is the source of our joy. We call this ‘Gaudete Sunday’; it recalls St Paul’s words “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, ‘rejoice’!”  All of us are called to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’, to bear witness to Christ. And a part of that is to bear witness to the deep joy which lies at the heart of our faith, whatever we may be going through at any particular time. It is not about pretending that life is fun when it is not; it is not about forcing a fixed grin. It is a joy which springs from the sort of assurance which St James speaks of the in Second Reading, with his picture of the patient farmer. Harvest time will come, but we have to wait for it. The death and resurrection of Christ assure us of God’s victory, of the ultimate total triumph of God’s love. But that does not get us off the hook. It doesn’t immediately smooth the path before us, any more than it did for Jesus. His healing miracles were signs of the coming of God, but the coming of God involved walking the way of the Cross. This  is not a matter of punishment. Least of all was it the Father vicariously punishing his Son. It was God entering into the conditions of human life, that life of which physical suffering is a part, as is human estrangement and sinfulness.
 
 ‘Be patient, brothers, until the Lord’s coming’, says St James. We are called with John the Baptist to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’. We are called and given grace through our baptism and confirmation to bear witness to Christ in the world. Sometimes we are called to do this directly by speaking about our faith. But above all we are called to bear witness just by being our Christian selves. By continuing to be faithful in our inmost hearts to the fundamental joy of the victory of God’s love which lies at the heart of our faith. And when things are hard, as they were for John the Baptist in his prison; when vision seems to be darkened, or when we have to endure suffering, I am to ask for the grace of God not to lose faith, but to know that as I walk this path, it is the path that God himself walked in Jesus, and continues to walk alongside and within each one of us.
   ‘Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees,
    and say to all faint hearts, ‘Courage! Do not be afraid.
    Look, your God is coming,
    He is coming to save you.’
 
 
2nd SUNDAY of ADVENT (Year A)

John the Baptist is not a comfortable figure. If he appeared today we might dismiss him as just a somewhat extreme religious crank. ‘Brood of vipers!’ ‘The axe is laid to the roots of the trees.’ ‘The chaff he will burn in a fire which will never go out.’ When I hear language like that, my defences go up. I find it quite hard to listen, or at least to listen as if it might have anything to say to me. In that light, it is even quite hard to hear the word ‘Repent!’ – the word which carries a central message of the Gospel. Indeed it is quite hard to hear what might be called the central message of Advent, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’ 
 
The clergy, as you probably know, are committed to praying the Office – the Breviary as it is sometimes called, or ‘The Prayer of the Church.’ It is mostly Psalms, which are often wonderful, but it contains an awful lot of words. Not least in ‘The Office of Readings’, which includes a long scripture reading and also a reading from the writings of the saints and Fathers of the Church. I mention this because it was one little quotation from the Office of Readings last week – one little sentence from the writings of St Charles Borromeo – which particularly struck me. St Charles, an Archbishop of Milan who died in 1584, wrote: ‘The Church wants us to understand that as Christ came into the world in the flesh, so now, if we remove all barriers, he is ready to come to us again at any minute or hour, to make his home spiritually within us in all his grace.’
 
Two things particularly struck me about that sentence. The first was that Advent is not only about the coming of Christ at Christmas, or the Coming of Christ in judgement at the end of the world. Advent is about the coming of Christ to us ‘at any minute or hour’. It could be said that it is in this sense that it is most important for us to hear the words of John the Baptist in the Gospel, ‘The kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’
 
And the second thing which struck me, and indeed challenged me, was that little phrase, ‘if we remove all barriers’. That challenge is almost another way of putting the challenge of John the Baptist in the Gospel – the challenge to ‘Repent!’. After all, the word ‘Repent!’ in the Gospel literally means to exchange one mind-set for another; to exchange one way of looking at things for another. So an excellent way of keeping the penitential season of Advent would be seriously to ask myself that question: ‘What are the barriers to the coming of Christ which I put up?’
 
St Charles Borromeo had a word for me last Monday, and then on Tuesday morning I was at a clergy meeting at the Carmelite Priory on Boars Hill. We had agreed previously that this time we would reflect further on some of the words of Pope Benedict during his visit to us in September.  Our leader had chosen three passages. The first was from Pope Benedict’s address to young people outside Westminster Cathedral. In the course of this he said something which reminded me of the words of St Charles. Pope Benedict said to his young listeners, ‘Jesus is always there. Quietly waiting for us to be still with him and to hear his voice. Deep within your heart, he is calling you to spend time with him in prayer. But this kind of prayer requires discipline. It requires time for moments of silence every day…. In silence we find God. And in silence we discover our true self.’  The lack of that silence is, I suspect, one of the greatest barriers we put up to awareness of the presence of Jesus. In our culture, and in the hectic lives we lead, it requires a high level of discipline and commitment to find it. Any of you who saw the television series ‘The Big Silence’ witnessed just what a challenge that was. But I suspect that it is worth asking the question. Do I, can I, find that silence?
 
The second passage we looked at was from the homily at the Mass at which Cardinal Newman was beatified. He quoted Blessed John Henry on the gradually transforming power of prayer: ‘a habit of prayer, the practice of turning to God in every season, in every place, …has a natural effect in spiritualising and elevating the soul. A man is no longer what he was before…’ Pope Benedict quoted this in the context of Cardinal Newman’s motto which provided the theme for the whole visit: ‘Heart speaks unto heart’. ‘It gives us’, he said, ‘an insight into the understanding of the Christian life as a call to holiness, experienced as the profound desire of the human heart to enter into intimate communion with the heart of God.’
 
So far today, I have been highlighting an understanding of Advent, the coming of Christ, which is highly intimate and personal. But that intimate and personal approach, that challenge to personal repentance and ‘putting on the mind of Christ’ has a wider context. Today’s Psalm response was ‘In his days justice shall flourish, and peace till the moon fails.’ In the second reading St Paul points out that Christ came so that the pagans – the nations of the world – should give glory to God for his mercy. The third passage offered to the clergy group was from Pope Benedict’s speech to politicians in Westminster Hall. One of the points the Pope made there was that religion was not simply a private matter. He pointed out that democracy itself was in trouble if its values rested on nothing more solid than social consensus - what you could get a majority of people at any one time to agree upon.
 
Today’s First Reading from the prophet Isaiah highlights the ultimate Advent hope of an era of justice and peace; an era when justice is administered with wisdom and integrity, and even the animal kingdom is no longer red in tooth and claw. The passage is also the source of the traditional ‘Gifts of the Holy Spirit’ which appear in the Rite of Confirmation – in the prayer which is said as hands are laid on the candidates before they are anointed. It isn’t always easy to distinguish the seven gifts prayed for. However there does seem to be a very clear distinction which comes through in the passage. It is the distinction between superficiality – judging by appearances, acting on hearsay – and wisdom. Wisdom as a quality which comes from really being open to God, open to the Spirit of the Lord; wisdom which comes from a conscious, daily practice of cultivating an inner silence and of seeking to be open to God in prayer; wisdom which grows gradually as we seek to nourish ourselves with the Scriptures and aim to ‘put on the mind of Christ’ -  Christ who is himself the embodiment of the Wisdom of God.
 
In today’s Gospel, the fiercest words of John the Baptist are addressed to the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Does this bit of the Gospel have anything to say to us? Well, perhaps we can see it as a bit more than a historical curiosity. Perhaps it does make a kind of link between the private and the public in the practice of our faith. Surely the Pharisees and the Sadducees always voted the right way when it came to supporting the official teaching of the Church as it was in their day. But it isn’t just a question of that. In the end, it is that interior quality which Blessed John Henry Newman and Pope Benedict were speaking about which leads to real wisdom; it is that quality which is the greatest contribution that faith can bring to the wider society. It isn’t a quality to be flaunted. It isn’t just for the clever or the influential. All of us are on that interior journey where ‘Heart speaks unto heart’, and to the degree that we are faithful to it, we contribute to the common good; we contribute to the advent of that time when ‘justice shall flourish, and peace till the moon fails’.     
 
 
Christ the King Year C

Today’s Gospel concludes with that wonderful exchange between the ‘good thief’ and Jesus on the Cross. There is the simple and humble prayer which we can all make our own, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’, and the response of Jesus as he too hangs in agony: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’.  It is a deeply intimate and personal exchange, and on the face of it a far cry from the central theme of this solemn feast of Christ the King – or to give it its full title, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe’.
 
It is, of course, the Feast which concludes the whole liturgical year of the Church. Next Sunday we will be beginning again with the season of Advent. But today, after all those Sundays of what we call ‘Ordinary Time’, we bring the Church’s year to an end with a great shout of triumph. We make this tremendous claim about the one we seek to follow, Jesus our Lord. We make the tremendous claim that he is not just our Lord, but everyone’s Lord. He is not just one among many; one teacher, one great religious figure, among the great teachers and religious figures of the world. He is not just one of a series of prophets of notable wisdom and insight. Jesus is, as St Paul so clearly states in that amazing passage from his Letter to the Colossians, no less than ‘the image of the invisible God’. ‘In him were created all things in heaven and earth.’ ‘All things are to be reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth.’ The one we seek to follow is the only one who can possibly claim that title of ‘King of the Universe’. As we shall say in a moment in the Creed, ‘Through him all things were made’. Through him all things were made, and through him and in him all things will be reconciled with their Creator; through him and in him will come about the ultimate fulfilment of God’s purposes of love and joy and peace.
 
Part of our response to the dazzling vision which St Paul sets before us in that Second Reading may well be, indeed perhaps ought to be, that these things are altogether too high and wonderful for me. The realisation of such an universal vision is a mystery beyond my grasp. So indeed it is. But I can still acknowledge it as true. It is a key element in the faith of the Church, that faith which the Church has professed throughout the centuries, and which she continues to profess. As we say at a baptism, ‘This is the faith of the Church; this is our faith.’ We may be dazzled by the mystery, but we can experience on this feast perhaps a little at least of the exaltation which goes with it. It is a matter of real joy to be among those who recognise Jesus as the Universal King; it can bring us great confidence to know that wherever we may be, whatever may be our circumstances, we cannot find ourselves outside that universal Kingdom. Jesus our Lord is risen from the dead. Jesus our Lord has ascended to the glory of the Father. ‘This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’
 
All that is absolutely right, but it is not exactly where we are directed to look today. It is not where today’s Gospel pointed us; even St Paul, at the end of his inspired hymn, takes us, perhaps, where we would prefer not to go. ‘God wanted all things to be reconciled through him… when he made peace by his death on the Cross.’  That is the bit we would love to be able to escape. But, as today’s Gospel underlines so clearly, that is the bit which is inescapable. Certainly we are an Easter people; certainly, as St Paul says elsewhere, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is pointless, and we are of all people the most pitiable. But I suspect that most of us would like to have the resurrection without the cross; we would prefer to find a short-cut to the glory.
 
Some weeks ago in our Church of Our Lady of the Rosary some proposals were exhibited for re-ordering the sanctuary. Part of the scheme was to remove the present picture of the Crucifixion behind the altar, and replace it not with a painting, but with a crucifix. Various possible designs were illustrated. One of these was the crucifix borrowed from Good Shepherd Church in Kennington. This depicts not the dead Christ on the cross, but Christ risen, Christ crowned and in priestly vestments; Christ, indeed, as High Priest and Universal King, but with arms stretched out against the background of the cross. It is an image which very properly seeks to hold together cross and resurrection, but it perhaps risks devaluing the cross itself. Not surprisingly, it was this image which obtained the largest number of votes. A similar tendency is to be found even within our church of the Holy Rood – our church dedicated to the Holy Cross. We have a traditional crucifix by the altar, as the church requires, but the dominant figure is the risen and ascended Christ, the Christ in majesty, who carries the symbol of his cross, but is no longer stretched in agony upon it.
 
But it is precisely there, to Christ still hanging on the Cross, that our gaze is directed by today’s Gospel. ‘The people stayed there watching Jesus.’ They are watching Jesus on the Cross, Jesus crucified between two thieves. Here is the King of the Jews, a figure not of obvious royalty, but rather of total contempt. The title was itself intended to be contemptuous, but even those who treated Jesus with contempt managed unwittingly to speak the truth at the same time. ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.’ He is indeed the King of the Jews, and the King of the Gentiles as well, the King of all the nations of the earth. But conventional notions of what royalty might mean are turned upside down.  He does not save himself, not because he could not, or because his Father could not save him. It has been said that it was not the nails, but love, which held Jesus on the Cross. Jesus does not save himself, because he is hanging there to save others; his total loving focus is on others – even those others who in their blindness are jeering at him and mocking him; those others who through all ages past, and all ages to come, will seek to go their own way, rejecting the God who has created them for love; rejecting the way of love and reconciliation, and embracing the way of destruction of those who stand in their path. We acclaim Jesus as Universal King not because he has in some conventional sense triumphed over all his enemies and had them crawling at his feet. We acclaim him as Universal King because absolutely nothing, not insults, not torture, not utter darkness of spirit, not death itself, deflected him from the course of being open with the inexhaustible love of God himself – open to whatever the world might fling at him, and whoever might fling it. And the Gospel makes very clear that this was no impersonal, generalised love. It embraced the whole world, but it found expression in response to a particular individual and fellow sufferer: ‘Jesus, remember me…’. ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’ It is a love which from the Cross embraces all, but equally embraces each one of us, as and where we are.
 
 ‘Fulfilled is now what David told,                                          Impleta sunt quae concinit
 In true prophetic song of old.                                                  David fideli carmine
 How God the nation’s king should be,                                   Dicendo nationibus,
  For God is reigning from the tree.’                                        Regnavit a ligno Deus.
                                                                                                      (Venantius Fortunatus c530-610)
     
 
 
 
 

33rd SUNDAY of YEAR C (2010)

 ‘Don’t let anyone have any food if they refuse to work.’ Beside that injuction of St Paul in the Second Reading today, everything recently proposed by Mr Duncan-Smith looks pretty tame. But what St Paul is dealing with is not a culture of dependency on welfare benefits. He appears to be dealing with fellow Christians who were so convinced of the imminent end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ in glory that they were just sitting down and waiting for it. It is the sort of attitude that you might say is encouraged by today’s First Reading from the prophet Malachi. ‘The day is coming now, burning like a furnace…’. Any moment the fire will descend to burn up the wicked, but those who fear God will find healing in the brilliance of that revelation, and will be ravished to heaven. There is plenty of this sort of imagery in the Bible, and indeed there is a good deal in the Gospels. We will surely meet it again soon in the season of Advent, which traditionally focuses not just on preparing for the First Coming of Christ at Christmas, but also on his Second Coming at the end of the world at Judge.
 
Indeed, in a moment we will be expressing our belief, as we do every week, that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. That belief does have important implications for our life of every day. However it does not mean that we expect it to be an event in the near future or even in our lifetime. In practice we recognise that we have to do just what St Paul orders; we have to go on quietly working and earning the food we eat. That is, for most of us, our principal preoccupation from day to day. The issue for us is not whether we can concentrate on getting on with our jobs because we are so anxious about whether Christ will return in glory at any moment and usher in the end of the world. The issue for us is rather the other way round. We are much more likely to get so absorbed by the life of every day, that we forget to see it in the light of Jesus Christ at all.
 
Today’s Gospel is particularly interesting in the light of this tension between day-to-day living and speculation and anxiety about the end of the world and God’s judgement. It begins with a bunch of tourists admiring the splendid national heritage of the Jerusalem temple. ‘What fine stonework and votive offerings.’ It has been built with huge devotion and skill, like our ancient cathedrals, and it is going to be there for centuries to come. Its very existence gives a sense of national pride and even security. The response of Jesus to this is devastating. ‘All these things you are staring at now – the time will come when not a single stone will be left on another: everything will be destroyed.’ Imagine the effect of saying to a visitor to the colleges of Oxford, marvelling at this extraordinary heritage, ‘All this is going to be destroyed’. It would be horrifying. And yet those who first heard today’s Gospel they would know that Jesus had spoken no less than the truth. By the time St Luke wrote his Gospel, that magnificent temple had already been destroyed by the Romans in AD70. To those who witnessed that destruction, it must have seemed like the end of the world. Indeed it was the end of Judaism as Judaism had been for five centuries – a faith centred on the Temple at Jerusalem as the place above all of God’s presence, and a faith whose worship had at its heart the practice of animal sacrifice. All that came to an end in a moment, when the Jerusalem Temple, that building which had seemed so enduring, was suddenly and comprehensively destroyed.
 
The first Christians clearly did expect the Lord to return relatively shortly after his Ascension. By the time St Luke is writing his Gospel, this expectation is having to be modified. The prophetic writings of the Old Testament suggest that the ‘Day of the Lord’, the final bringing in of God’s Kingdom, will be preceded by conflict and catastrophe. It will, after all, involve the final conflict with the powers of evil, and the final victory over them. Jesus himself picks up and reinforces this traditional teaching. But we now have to hear it in a rather different context. While Old Testament prophecy looks forward to some final battle with evil in the future, for us it is different. In a crucial sense – quite literally a crucial sense – that decisive battle was fought and won by Jesus on the Cross. So for us, Jesus comes again not to fight the battle, but to be the Judge.
 
But the fact remains that natural disasters, earthquakes and plagues and famines, do seem like signs of the end of the world. To those who are not merely distant observers, but who are caught up in them; to those immediately involved – in Haiti, in Pakistan - they must actually seem to be the end of the world. At this time we remember those who were engulfed in the horror of two World Wars, and indeed those who face death daily in continuing conflicts. To be caught up in war must also seem like ‘the end of the world’. But these events are not in a straightforward sense ‘signs of the end’. They are in fact the conditions of life in our world, a world which we understand to be fundamentally God’s good creation, and yet a world which is mysteriously disordered; a world in which humanity has departed from God’s original intention, so that we seem incapable of living in peace.
 
Most of us, for much of the time, can get along quite happily from one day to the next without bothering ourselves too much about the sort of ultimate issues which these catastrophic events inevitably bring before us. For most of us, most of the time, natural disasters and the carnage of war are things which happen elsewhere. The other trial that today’s Gospel mentions is persecution – something almost inevitable for the first Christian communities. Most of the time we manage to avoid even this, by keeping a fairly low profile. We avoid it even in its modern guise as described by Pope Benedict in Hyde Park; there he spoke of having our faith ‘dismissed out of hand, ridiculed and parodied’.
 
Facing death on the battlefield, losing everything in flood or earthquake, fighting for the life of a child in a cholera epidemic, keeping the faith in Baghdad when to be a Christian is to be marked down for assassination – these things force ultimate questions upon us. In the face of these, says Jesus in the Gospel, ‘your endurance will win you your lives’. This ‘endurance’ could equally well be translated ‘patience’. The slang phrase would be ‘hanging in there’. What this quality demands is continuing to set all my experience, however apparently dark, bleak, painful and hopeless, in the context of the God who ultimately will not allow a hair of your head to be lost.  In the context of the God whose Son plumbed the depths of darkness and death, and yet rose victorious from the dead. Not a hair of his head was lost.
 
‘Your endurance, your patience, will win you your lives.’ It is surely just as important, and in some ways rather more difficult, to set our very ordinary, busy but relatively humdrum lives in the context of the God who will not allow a hair of my head to be lost. It requires, perhaps, a rather different sort of patient endurance. The patient endurance which, for example, is linked to carving out a reflective time each day deliberately to make that connection; the connection between the God who is both our Saviour and our Judge, and our everyday tasks, responses and relationships. Indeed it might help to recall the connection as it is illustrated for us in the offertory at every Mass. For there the work of our hands, the substance of our everyday lives, is brought to the altar. It is brought to the altar to be taken up into the sacrifice of Christ, the healing sacrifice through which the whole world is being judged, redeemed and renewed.   
 

FEAST of ALL SAINTS (2010)

 Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints. Saints have made the headlines recently, thanks to Pope Benedict’s visit, which had the Beatification of John Henry Newman as its centre-piece. Perhaps that visit is already beginning to recede into the past. But when the clergy of our Pastoral Area met the other day, we felt that it would be important to keep reflecting on some of the themes which the Holy Father highlighted during his visit. The handy source for his words which I keep by me is a special edition of L’Osservatore Romano; after the visit I was sent a complementary copy.
 
On the Friday morning of his visit, Pope Benedict  addressed 4,000 students from Catholic Schools round the country. The headline for this address in my version is utterly appropriate for today’s feast. It is ‘Future Saints of 21st Century’. His theme was the call to holiness. And he emphasised the ‘bigger picture’ behind all the different subjects of study in school. The aim of a Catholic School is to set all these different subjects in the context of God, and indeed within a living relationship with the living God. He said ‘God loves you much more than you could ever begin to imagine, and he wants the very best for you. And by far the best thing for you is to grow in holiness.’ It is, in a sense, a very simple message, and very simply expressed. And it is certainly not one to be confined to those at school. Indeed it is the message which lies behind today’s Second Reading. ‘Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are.’ I will return to that in a moment.
 
First, a moment to focus on a later verse of that same reading – the one perhaps specifically intended as the focus on this feast day. St John speaks about the future that awaits us, the future which is, for the saints, not future but present. ‘We shall see God as God really is.’ The saints enjoy now the vision of God as God really is. That huge number, impossible to count, are part of the worship of heaven so vividly described in the First Reading – the worship before the throne of God and of the Lamb. And we need to remember that it is into that worship that we are taken up, even in the midst of this life, when we come to Mass. The First Eucharistic Prayer contains those wonderful words, ‘we pray that your angel may take this sacrifice to your altar in heaven’. We pray that our pleading of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross here on earth may be one with his constant pleading of his sacrifice before the Father in heaven – in heaven where he ‘lives for ever to intercede for us’. We pray that it may be one, but we know by faith that it is one.  As we will say in a moment in the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer: ‘Around your throne, the saints, our brothers and sisters, sing your praise for ever. With their great company and all the angels, we praise your glory: ‘Holy, holy, holy…’.
 
Today’s Feast takes us up into the worship of heaven, as does every Mass. We are reminded that we too have been created by God out of pure love. We have been created to enjoy the vision of God; created to share the joy of the saints, our brothers and sisters; created to see God as God really is, and indeed created to reflect - as far as is possible for us – the likeness of God. That is our faith. That is our hope.
 
But, as St John says, ‘Surely everyone who entertains this hope must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.’ The Feast of All Saints is not only a joyful celebration of their blessedness. It is also a reminder that we are all called to be saints. We are all called to ‘purify ourselves; to be as pure as Christ’. That word ‘pure’ is, I’m afraid, a tricky one. It has all sorts of unhelpful overtones. My instant reaction is ‘I couldn’t possibly be as pure as Christ.’ He was without sin; I am a sinner, even if I am a repentant sinner. I may have had a white garment at my baptism, but I certainly haven’t kept it perfectly clean. And even if I have taken it to the wash regularly through confession, compared with the purity of Christ it is looking like one of those over-washed woollens – certainly somewhat matted and generally a bit grey.
 
That is a very natural reaction. And it is almost saying ‘I couldn’t be a saint of 21st Century. I’ll settle for something less.’ In a way it is humble. But the trouble is, there isn’t anything less. We are all, in the last resort, called to be saints. And if that is a bit unnerving, we have to go back to St John. ‘Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us.’ That is the starting point. As Pope Benedict emphasised, ‘God loves you much more than you could ever begin to imagine.’ ‘God loves us with a depth and an intensity that we can scarcely begin to comprehend.’ We are God’s children, and we are his children in the very special sense of being specifically sealed as his children through baptism and confirmation; sealed by the Holy Spirit as his adopted children in Jesus Christ – Jesus the Son of God.
 
Today’s Gospel gives us the heart of Jesus’ teaching about how we are to live as God’s children and as  disciples of Jesus. It speaks about gentleness, and compassion for those who suffer; it speaks about a passion for justice and about working for peace and reconciliation. It speaks about responding to hostility with love – the love that Jesus himself showed in the face of that ultimate hostility on the Cross. These are the characteristics of those who, as Pope Benedict says, ‘are well on the way to becoming saints’. But there are two Beatitudes which strike me as being foundational for all the others. The first is this – and it is the first: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of God.’ The heart of being ‘poor in spirit’ is to know your absolute need of God and God’s love. If I am to be a saint, it will not be by my own effort, struggling up to heaven. It will be because I have recognised my neediness, and humbly opened myself up to God’s grace. St Paul heard the Lord say to him, ‘My grace is sufficient for you’. He says the same to each one of us. The Second foundational Beatitude is this: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart; they shall see God’. You can see that this links with St John in the reading. ‘We shall see God as God really is.’ ‘Whoever entertains this hope must purify himself..’.
 
I hope some of you have been watching ‘The Big Silence’ on BBC 2. It is about five people with little formal religious background going on an eight-day silent retreat. Fr Christopher Jamieson from Worth Abbey points out that the central aim of the life of a Benedictine monk is to come to ‘purity of heart’. He believes that silence is an essential part of this journey to purity of heart, and therefore to encounter with God. The silent retreat actually takes place at St Beuno’s – the Jesuit Spirituality Centre in North Wales. St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, did not particularly speak about ‘purity of heart’, but he did speak about the journey towards the vision of God. St Ignatius talked about the choices we make in life, and the fact that all our choices need to be governed by one over-riding choice – the choice of God. He is in fact saying exactly the same as St Benedict. A ‘pure’ heart is a heart set, like the heart of Jesus, on one thing only, and that one thing is doing the will of the Father, doing the will of God. That is what holiness means.
 
Whatever choices I make in life, whatever choices I make through the day, I am called to make them within that fundamental choice of God. I am to make every choice within that big picture – the picture of responding to the God who loves me more than I can possibly imagine; responding to the God who has created me to reflect that love, and to live within that communion of love – that communion of saints – where I shall see God as God really is, and enjoy him for ever. 

30th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘C’ (2010)

‘Two men went up to the temple to pray.’ So do we all, Sunday by Sunday. As a proportion of the population as a whole, we are a tiny minority. Most of the time we are a hidden minority, although we recently ‘came out’ for the visit of Pope Benedict, and perhaps discovered that there were really quite a lot of us, and that there was rather more sympathy for us among the public at large than we had been led to suppose.
 
  So what are we doing here? If it is to the Temple we have come – and that is a perfectly proper word to use for this place – then we have come to the place where the supreme reality of God is visibly acknowledged. We have come to the place where we encounter the real presence of the living God. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews makes the link between the temple in Jerusalem, that temple on ‘Mount Zion’ to which those two very different men went to pray, and ‘the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem’ into which we are drawn when we come to Mass. ‘What you have come to’, he says,  ‘is nothing known to the senses: not a blazing fire, or total darkness, or a storm; or trumpet-blast… the scene that made even Moses tremble.’ No, it is not that you have come to, but something even more tremendous – ‘the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival. You have come to God himself…’.
 
   You have come to God himself; the God who is not only the God of transcendent and insupportable brilliance and majesty, but also the God who has emptied himself of that glory and majesty, and taken the form of a servant.  The God whose ultimate sacrifice on the Cross, that sacrifice vindicated by Resurrection, by Ascension, by return to heavenly glory, is made present at every Mass. The God who not only is beyond perception by the senses, but is also the God who comes to meet us in the simple sacramental gifts which flow from that sacrifice; comes to meet us in his divinity, in his godhead still united to humanity, in the gift of his Body and Blood. ‘Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore.’ Not perhaps a hymn we sing as often as once we did. But we acknowledge the reality of that hidden mystery as we come into church, as we enter the temple. We genuflect to where that hidden mystery is itself further hidden within the tabernacle. And the purpose of that is to remind us before we begin of what we are doing here. And if we reflect on what we are doing here, we are surely driven towards the heart-felt response of the tax-collector – ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’. This is, of course, exactly how we do begin every Mass. We begin with a penitential rite. We begin with an acknowledgement of our unworthiness to be here. We acknowledge our need for God’s mercy.
 
   Two men went up into the temple to pray. That there is a striking difference between them is obvious. But the heart of that difference is not that one was a religious professional and the other was a social outcast. The most striking difference is that one managed to come into the temple to pray without even noticing that he had come into the presence of God. The other was overwhelmed by that presence, and didn’t even dare to raise his eyes to heaven. The Pharisee might as well have been in a cinema; the tax-collector, however unworthy and overwhelmed he felt, knew without a doubt he was in the presence of the living God. He came into the temple with reverence.
 
  Someone recently sent me a copy of a speech made by Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic. It was a speech of welcome to a conference concerned with our human environment. He began by speaking of the changes he had noticed over the years as he drove out of Prague into the country. He spoke of the way in which a concentration on short-term gain had transformed the city at its edges, and the countryside around it, into a shapeless wilderness. We can see something similar around cities in this country. But his reflection on this was striking.  Reflecting on this, he said: ‘We are living in the first atheistic civilisation, in other words, a civilisation that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity.  For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit…The most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilisation is its pride…With the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness, there disappears respect for mystery, and along with it, humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions.’
 
 Vaclav Havel is not, as far as I know, a Christian believer. But the word that for me connected what he said to today’s Gospel was the word ‘reverence’. ‘Respect for mystery.’ ‘Humble reverence for everything we shall never measure or know.’ The atheistic pride of which he spoke seems to me to be perfectly symbolised by the Pharisee in the Gospel – the Pharisee who was a religious professional, and yet, as the Gospel specifically states, ‘said his prayer to himself’. In his self-congratulation he has in fact excluded the transcendent mystery of God.
 
  In the light of this, today’s Gospel seems to me to contain both a warning and a challenge. The warning is this. We should not assume, just because we are practising Christians, that we have not deeply imbibed some of the fundamentally atheistic attitudes that are current, and indeed dominant, in our culture. The Pharisee was at one level a profoundly religious man. His prayer was apparently addressed to God; he was a believer. But in fact he prayed to himself. At a profound level of his being, God was excluded. It could happen to us.
 
 And the challenge is the challenge of the tax-collector. We do not, like him, necessarily have to sit at the back of the church. It would be a shame if we never allowed ourselves to raise our eyes to heaven, but became totally entrenched in our unworthiness. That too could lead to a distorted pre-occupation with self.  But what the publican did have, and what we should all do our best to cultivate, is a sense of reverence – reverence before the mystery of the eternal God; the God of love who created the whole universe, all things seen and unseen, and sustains them in being, and sustains us in being, from moment to moment. We need to cultivate this sense not just for ourselves, but for the world at large. As a priestly people, we must do our part in restoring the true vision of the world. Today is World Mission Sunday, and that, surely, is a central aspect of our mission. And we need to cultivate that reverence not just when we come into the temple, although we need perhaps to think about it in that context to start with. We need to cultivate a spirit of reverence  as we go about our ordinary lives in a world which we truly believe to be God’s world. It means, perhaps, moments of deliberate recollection through the day.  But, by whatever means, we must allow that  reverence which we cultivate in church to spill over into unlikely places and contexts; into those places and contexts in which we are most unthinkingly conformed to the world’s short-sighted vision; that vision which, for quite other reasons than that of the tax collector, cannot raise its eyes to heaven.
 

28th SUNDAY of Year C (2010) – Healing

Ten lepers were healed; only one returned to give thanks. What happened to the other nine? We don’t know. Presumably they returned to their families, and continued with their ordinary lives. They had got their health back. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times that people have said to me over the years, ‘I’ve got my health; that’s the main thing.’ And it is very understandable.
 
But, as today’s Gospel perhaps implies, it isn’t in fact the main thing. To the leper who returns to give thanks, Jesus says, “Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you”. Jesus speaks of this leper who returns to him as not merely healed, but ‘saved’. And he has been saved by his faith. What has saved him is his relationship to Jesus Christ. In the Second Reading, St Paul summarises the Good News. The heart of the good news is ‘the salvation that is in Christ Jesus and the eternal glory that comes with it’. That, surely -when the chips are down – that, surely, is the main thing.
 
So that is ‘the main thing’, but it isn’t obvious what it means. Not everyone would agree, but taking human experience as a whole there does seem to be a longing for God deep in the human heart. And the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who is love. The God who is a community of love. A community and yet a perfect unity of love; the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father, in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. We are made, ultimately, for ‘the salvation which is in Christ Jesus, and the eternal glory that comes with it’.  As Jesus says in St John’s Gospel, ‘In that day you will know that I am in the Father and you in me and I in you’. We are made to be taken up into that eternal communion of love. Words, of course, fail. But we can perhaps glimpse the direction in which they point. And it is there, in that communion with God and with each other in love – in that communion of saints – that we will find our ultimate and total wholeness, our complete and final health.
 
It is that Kingdom of God which Jesus announces. It is that Kingdom of God which Jesus inaugurates through his suffering, death and resurrection. It is that Kingdom of God which we are called to embody here and now as far as possible, as indeed at every Mass we are brought into intimate communion with Jesus himself. Jesus in his earthly life proclaimed the Kingdom of God. He restored some who were tormented in mind to sanity. He restored lepers, and many others who were physically ill – he restored them to bodily health. And he often made the connection between illness of whatever kind and sin.
 
All of this takes us into an area of great complexity – much greater perhaps, than people would have realised at the time of Jesus. That there is often a connection between conscious and even sub-conscious mental states and physical illness is evident, but the relationship between the two is not straightforward. That all illness, mental or physical, is disordered – is not as God wills or intended – that is clear. But to what extent it can be linked to sin except in that very broad sense of ‘disorder’ is not clear.  But what is clear is that Jesus performed miracles of healing as part of his preaching of the coming of God’s Kingdom. These wonders were not simply to astonish, or to be a ‘health service’. They were signs; signs that in the person of Jesus the Kingdom of God was breaking in to our world.  After all, not everyone was healed. And most importantly of all, Jesus himself was not healed. At the Cross, people wondered whether Elijah would come and save him. But he suffered, and he died.
 
Jesus preached the coming of God’s Kingdom, he healed the sick, he cast out demons. After Pentecost, the apostles went out in the power of the Holy Spirit of Jesus, and did the same. So we read in the Acts of the Apostles the words of St Peter to the lame man begging at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple: ‘I have neither silver nor gold, but I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus Christ, walk!’ And he went off ‘walking and jumping and praising God’.
 
So has all this come to an end? No. The Church of Jesus Christ continues to exercise a ministry of healing linked to her fundamental proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and Jesus as Saviour of the world. And there are still miracles, although they are rare. The Beatification of Blessed John Henry Newman brought one such into prominence – the healing of Deacon Jack Sullivan. Such otherwise inexplicable occurrences are regularly investigated at Lourdes, but there, as elsewhere in the Church, the main emphasis is not on miracles. The main emphasis is on healing in the fullest sense – that growth in faith and responsiveness to the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. And in that connection we should not forget the vast amount of conventional health-care which is offered all over the world, but especially to the poorest of the world – offered by the Church of Jesus Christ and offered in his name.
 
Often linked to what is called ‘conventional medicine’, but not always so linked, is the sacramental ministry of the Church. Following the Second Vatican Council, the Sacrament of  Anointing has been restored to the sick, and not just given to the dying. All the Sacraments are actions of Jesus himself, mediated by his Body the Church. When a priest lays hands on a sick person with prayer, preferably with others praying with him – when he does this, and anoints the sick person, it is the ministry of Jesus which is continued. My experience is that this sacrament always brings the gift of peace. Sometimes it brings remarkable healing. But it is also a consecration of the sick person’s sufferings, uniting them with the Passion of Christ. In his letter to the Colossians, St Paul speaks of his sufferings as ‘making up what still has to be undergone by Christ.’ Linked to Christ and accepted and offered with him, suffering can become not just a negative thing, but a prayer for the redemption of the world.
 
There is the sacramental healing ministry of the Church; there is the healing ministry of doctors and nurses carried out in the name of Jesus Christ. But within the Church there are also healing gifts which are given to particular people, possibly with a particular focus. We sometimes call these gifts ‘charismatic’. That word is sometimes used to differentiate such gifts from the more structured sacramental ministry of the Church. That is a reasonable distinction, provided we do not see the sacramental and the ‘charismatic’ as in any way in opposition to each other. Each has a proper place within the Body of Christ. ‘Charismatic’ is a word sometimes associated with a particular emphasis on the Holy Spirit, because ‘charisma’ simply means ‘free gift’, and we speak of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
 
In fact it is the gift of the Holy Spirit which links the Body of Christ, the Church, to her Head. There can be no sacraments, no prayer, no Christian service of others, without the Holy Spirit. Last week Timothy was urged to ‘fan into a flame’ the gift he had been given. We all need to be open to that. But we also need to be aware of the wonderful diversity of gifts and styles of life and ministry within the Church, and avoid the temptation to the exaltation of one above another.
 
However it is perhaps particularly appropriate to speak of this ‘charismatic’ ministry of healing at this time, as we will be welcoming into the parish in January two people who are particularly gifted in this way. There is a little more about this in the Newsletter, and more will be said about it in coming weeks.
 
Ten lepers were healed; one leper returned to make an act of faith in Jesus Christ. He recognised, albeit dimly perhaps, the salvation, the total wholeness and healing, that is in Jesus Christ – Jesus Christ in whom our humanity is re-created and made new. It is in that context that the Church continues to exercise a ministry of healing in the name of Jesus, recognising also that the path to that eternal glory was for Jesus the path of the Cross, and that for some, and no doubt in a certain sense for all, that is the path for his followers. As we are today reminded:
    If we have died with him, then we shall live with him.
    If we hold firm, then we shall reign with him.
    We may be unfaithful, but he is always faithful,
    For he cannot disown his own self.   
  
 

27th SUNDAY of Year C (2010)

Two weeks have passed since the visit of Pope Benedict. But it continues to resonate. Indeed may it continue to do so for a long time to come. ‘Fan into a flame the gift that God gave you.’ So says St Paul today to Timothy. So, if not in so many words, said Pope Benedict to us all. From the accounts given by those who attended the big events, the thing that most sticks in my mind is their mention of the silence. The silence in Hyde Park at the adoration of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament; the silences during the Mass at Cofton Park – silences before the mystery - silence so deep that you could hear the birds sing. As a television viewer, what struck me particularly was the encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey. Even at this difficult time it spoke of a deeper unity of Christians – a unity so much needed in order to be able to give an effective witness to the truth of Christ to our world. But the words of Pope Benedict that have been around most for me in these weeks were spoken not in Westminster Abbey but in Westminster Hall. There he spoke about the relationship between faith and reason.
 
He was addressing the role of religion, of faith in God, in relation to the ethical foundations for political choices. A secular government has to make decisions which involve moral judgements. In principle it can do this by the light of natural reason. But, given the actual condition of human beings, Pope Benedict said that a perspective of faith could ‘purify’ and bring light to this process. The role of faith is one of real engagement. Not just the engagement of prayer, although prayer certainly has an important place. Not just standing with placards in protest against what we think is wrong, although that too has its place. He was speaking about engaging in the discussion itself, but from the standpoint of faith, from the standpoint of being rooted in the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. And it is in that context that we can hear the further words of St Paul to Timothy: ‘God’s gift was not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power and love and self-control. So you are never to be ashamed of witnessing to the Lord…’.
 
But it was also extraordinarily interesting, I thought, that Pope Benedict spoke also of the ‘structuring and purifying role of reason’ in relation to religion. Faith completely isolated from any contact with reason can become a purely emotional and even destructive force. It may have the power of attraction which we can see in some cults, but it can never engage in a conversation which seeks to alert others to something that is true. It can only try to shout louder.   Our faith is based on God’s revelation of himself; our faith goes beyond the limits of natural reason. But our faith is also a reasonable faith. As Pope Benedict said, ‘faith and reason need one another.’
 
Our faith is a reasonable faith, but not therefore just an intellectual matter. Blessed John Henry Newman, whose first feast day occurs later this week, was a powerful exponent of the reasonableness of faith, but his motto we now all know well. His motto was ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’ -‘heart speaks unto heart.’ So St Peter says in his First Letter: ‘Simply proclaim the Lord Christ holy in your hearts, and always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you have.’ (1 Peter 3:15)
 
St Peter there links holiness and witness. Part of the tragedy of recent scandals in the Church is that they stop the message of the Gospel being heard. Especially they stop the Christian teaching which really challenges our culture being heard. Because people will only listen to this if they see something in the people who believe it which really attracts them. People will then say, ‘If these transparently good and generous and loving people are also really committed to this, then there may after all be something in it.’ So there is a challenge to all of us - a challenge which Pope Benedict issued especially to young people – there is a challenge to holiness.  But it is a challenge linked to the challenge to respond to those who ask for a reason for the hope that is in us. Blessed John Henry Newman also wrote: ‘I want an intelligent and well-instructed laity…people who have an insight into the relation of truth to truth; who understand how faith and reason stand to each other, and what are the bases and principles of Catholicism.’
 
‘Fan into a flame the gift that God gave you when I laid my hands on you.’ So says St Paul to Timothy, and we are reminded, perhaps, of our Confirmation. And the apostles say to the Lord in the Gospel, “Increase our faith.” The Lord’s response is puzzling. It sounds a bit like ‘Just a grain of faith, and you could do the impossible.’ So what are we asking for, particularly in the context of bearing witness in the world, if we ask the Lord to increase our faith?
 
First of all, the gift of faith is the gift of trusting God. None of us could move a mountain or even a mulberry tree simply by gritting our teeth and believing we could. But with God, nothing is impossible. The gift of faith is the gift of absolute trust in the God for whom nothing is impossible. Nothing is impossible for God, but the God who has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ is not an arbitrary God. He doesn’t just play tricks or engage in aimless demonstrations of power. But he is the God from whom and for whom all things exist.  He is the One to whom I am related in every moment and every action of my life. ‘Increase my faith.’ That is, help me to live my life, to unify my life, around that centre. May my faith not be partly in God and partly in things which are in some ways rivals to God. May all my loves that are true and good be harmonised and brought into unity around God, the source and goal of all true love.
 
‘Increase my faith.’ Help my life to be more unified in God. But also deepen my commitment.  The God who can move mountains and mulberry trees, the God for whom nothing is impossible, is in fact totally trustworthy. His purposes are totally good. The ultimate witness of that total commitment to that totally trustworthy God is martyrdom. Clearly it is wrong to court martyrdom. But we should surely pray for a faith which is so deeply committed, that to be faithful to God is more important than life itself. Perhaps, at a more ordinary level, we should pray for a faith which is daily on the look-out for God’s call to self-giving rather than self-serving.
 
And finally, in reflecting on that prayer, ‘Increase my faith’, we might look at today’s First Reading. It begins with a world of outrage and violence, from which God appears to be absent; in relation to which God seems deaf and uncaring. The prophet tells us that the vision of God’s Kingdom will be fulfilled – without fail. Increase my faith so that I never lose hope. Increase my faith so that however dire the circumstances  I am always a bringer of hope. Not just an optimist, but one whose hope is rooted in the God who can not only move mountains and mulberry trees, but is the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. ‘See how he flags, he whose soul is not at rights, but the upright will live by his faithfulness.’ 

25th SUNDAY of Year C (2010) – Papal Visit

We must surely all rejoice greatly that the visit of the Holy Father to these islands has been a joyful event and a great success. And it is really extraordinary that the Scripture readings for this Sunday should fit so neatly with the visit and the particular themes which Pope Benedict has been underlining.
 
‘My advice’, says St Paul to Timothy, ‘is that there should be prayers offered for everyone, and especially for kings and others in authority, so that we may be able to live religious and reverent lives in peace and quiet.’ They might have been Pope Benedict’s words. Although they can sound to us almost cosy; but I don’t suppose that to their original hearers they sounded quite like that. We are fortunate enough to be able to take ‘peace and quiet’ largely for granted. However, as the Holy Father has pointed out, even in our own country there have been some threats to our tradition of religious freedom.
 
But when St Paul speaks about ‘peace and quiet’, he is not, I think, simply speaking about the freedom to live and worship as a Christian without interference or persecution. He is underlining the role of the secular state in maintaining peace, law and order. He is underlining the role of government in enabling ordinary people to go about their business and lead their lives without the constant fear of attack and disruption. And he is seeing this as a gift of God. Civil government is in itself a gift of God, and those responsible for maintaining it should be the object of both our prayers and our thanksgivings.
 
And he is not simply seeing this in the context of the little Christian community. ‘God wants everyone to be saved’, he says; ‘and reach full knowledge of the truth.’ The good ordering of civil society is something which contributes to God’s purpose of salvation. And then he makes a firm statement of the universal claim of Christian faith: ‘there is only one God, and there is only one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus who sacrificed himself as a ransom for them all.’ When you realise that these words must have been written to a quite small and apparently insignificant community of Christians, this concern for the wider community becomes even more striking, as does the universal vision.
 
As the Holy Father has continually stressed, it is this vision upon which our secular culture has in fact been built. This is not something of which we should for one moment be ashamed. We should not allow those who would try to disguise the Christian roots of our culture to have their way. And I hope that one of the fruits of this visit will be a greater courage on the part of Christians as a whole in standing up to those secularising forces. And for me one of the most moving moments of the visit was the Evening Prayer in Westminster Abbey. For all the divisions between Christians, and especially between Catholics and Anglicans, the deeper sense of unity in a shared faith came across very powerfully. Actions seemed on that occasion to speak louder than words.
 
The Second Reading this Sunday emphasises that theme of the proper concern of the Christian community for the secular order and for those who govern. But how extraordinary also that the Gospel should be concerned with God and money, and that we should have heard the prophet Amos denouncing those who engage in sharp financial practice and are motivated by greed! Pope Benedict referred to the recent and indeed continuing financial crisis as an example of what can happen when people lose sight of ethical standards. He also pointed out to the politicians and distinguished guests assembled in Westminster Hall that social consensus is not enough as a basis for morality. There has to be some kind of transcendental vision of humanity and human community.
 
It would not be true to say that those who do not believe in God can have no moral standards. For one thing, as the Pope mentioned, the ‘natural law’ is in principle accessible by human reason apart from faith.  But there is a real question about whether a truly human morality is ultimately sustainable without the context of faith in God, with all that that implies. One of the things it must surely imply is the sense of being not ourselves gods, but rather created beings – God’s creatures, responsible under God. And linked to that must surely be an awareness of others as likewise God’s creation. And from that must flow too a sense of life itself as a gift of God.
 
As I said earlier, I hope one of the fruits of this visit will be that all Christians will have been strengthened and given courage to stand up for their faith in the face of those who would marginalise it and make it just a private thing. And I think it is clear that the motivation for this suppression of Christian faith does not come from other religious groups but from people of no religious belief. It is important that the place of Christianity in our culture is not simply seen as a place of privilege. We are asking for that place to be recognised, not masked, as a highly significant and continuing historical fact. But beyond that, we are not asking for privileges which are not in principle open to people of other faiths. We simply ask, as Archbishop Rowan Williams said in Westminster Abbey, to be free to put our case and to be listened to and heard. And in the face of what has been called ‘aggressive atheism’ we can and should make common cause with people of other religious traditions than Christian. If there is that connection between faith in God and the renewal of a moral sense at the heart of our culture, then surely all major faith traditions can share in that task.
 
We began with the Letter to Timothy, and concern and prayer for the secular order and its government. We can be sure that for those early disciples there was no dream of this little Christian community taking over the government. And we recognise today that there is a proper role under God for the secular state. Its task is to maintain a place where people with a variety of views can live together in ‘peace and quiet’. It does not exist to promote some secular ideology, or indeed some religious ideology, and when it does so it steps beyond its proper bounds. For those whose task is to maintain that proper secular environment we should indeed pray and give thanks.
 
 But we can and must also give thanks for the centuries of Christian tradition which helped to form it. And within it may we continue to be free to proclaim with joy and conviction the ultimate saving truth for all humanity – the truth that there is only one God, and there is only one mediator between God and humankind, himself a man, Christ Jesus, who sacrificed himself on the Cross as a ransom for them all, and now is alive  and reigns for ever and ever.    
 

24th SUNDAY of Year C (2010)

People sometimes complain that in the Church we go on and on about sin. But today there is really no escape from talking about sin. Sin is a key theme in each of the three readings.
 
The First Reading concerns the sin of apostasy. Apostasy is about abandoning the true God; the sin of idolatry is about putting something else in that place in our lives which can only truly belong to the living God. And in this case it is not the sin of an individual, but the sin of a whole people. God says to Moses, ‘Your people have apostatised; they have been quick to leave the way I marked out for them; they have made themselves a calf of molten metal’.
 
In the Second Reading, St Paul reflects on his own sinful past. ‘I used to be a blasphemer, and did all I could to injure and discredit the faith.’ He had in fact actively persecuted Christians. In so doing he was persecuting Jesus Christ himself – the one he came to recognise as his Lord and the Son of God. What could be more appallingly sinful than that? He saw himself as the greatest of sinners. But if he was indeed the greatest of sinners, he was also the sign of the immensity of God’s mercy. And St Paul links the mercy of God to the fact that he had been acting in ignorance. When St Paul was persecuting the Church, he was under the impression that he was doing the will of God.
 
This strikes me as particularly interesting for us today, for two reasons. The first is that there is generally a much diminished sense of sin. Certainly people continue to have consciences; they continue to have a sense of right and wrong. But the notion of ‘sin’ is inescapably linked to a sense of having failed to keep to ‘the way marked out by God’.  As believers, we recognise that to fail to love our neighbour is a failure also to love God. But if there is no God, then no problem about right and wrong, perhaps, but no ‘sin’.
 
The second reason why St Paul’s mention of his ignorance is so interesting today is linked to the first. A great deal of human sin is in fact linked to ignorance. It is not malice that causes many young people brought up in the Christian faith to abandon it. It is not ill-will that causes many highly intelligent and thoughtful people to reject the idea of the sanctity of human life. And surely the most dramatic example of all is those Islamist fanatics who commit suicidal acts of murder and terror, and in doing so are convinced that they are doing the will of God and that their heavenly future is assured. That was, indeed, until his conversion, exactly the position of St Paul himself.
 
In the light of this, it seems to me clear that the vast bulk of human sin is indeed sin committed in ignorance. I suspect it will be true of our own sins. But above all it puts a rather different perspective on that absolutely central Christian declaration of St Paul in the Second Reading: ‘Here is a saying you can rely on, and nobody should doubt: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’
 
‘Jesus Christ came to save sinners.’ We are inclined, I think, to hear that word ‘sinner’ as a specialist word applied to those religious people who seek to recognise their shortcomings before God. On the whole I imagine that we simply don’t think of the unbelieving world in terms of  ‘sin’ at all. They are just unbelievers – or people of other faiths. We may recognise that the world is full of appalling injustices and terrible violence, as well as much goodness and beauty. We recognise the presence in the world of something we might call ‘evil’, but we are unlikely to think of humanity as a whole as ‘sinners’. It seems rather presumptuous and rude. It seems so, even if, as we must, we include ourselves in that ignorant mass.
 
But that, surely, is how we should hear that declaration of St Paul – that fundamental declaration of Christian faith: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’. In terms of the First Reading, all have failed to follow the way that God has marked out for them - the way marked out for humanity as a whole. We all have our personal sins, and we should not simply forget about these. But we are all implicated as part of the human race in the vast structures of injustice and inequality, of misuse of power and use of violence, which are endemic in our world. And if one wanted a symbol for all of that, the golden calf would not, I suspect, be too bad a one.
 
You may well be thinking at this point that it is really outrageous that we have been given the story of the Prodigal Son as our Gospel, and I haven’t even made reference to it. And isn’t it enough on its own? Why add on to this amazing story the two little parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin? But as I reflected further, my perspective changed. The Prodigal Son is a story of the Father’s love – certainly it is. But it is a story of the Father’s love in the context of an act of repentance by a sinner who ‘came to his senses’.  As I reflected further on the readings for this Sunday as a whole, it was not the Prodigal who came to the fore, but those other two parables – the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin.
 
In the First Reading, God is pictured as becoming aware once again of the sinfulness of the world and preparing to destroy the whole lot. And it is Moses who causes God to think again. Moses as intercessor is a powerful figure in the Old Testament. Some understandings of the Christian Faith have placed Jesus in a position similar to the position of Moses. God the Father is so enraged by the apostasy and idolatry of the world that he would have destroyed it if Jesus his Son had not persuaded him to relent. The angry God demands at least the death of his Son. Jesus is the one who pacifies a fundamentally angry God. That picture of God is a terrible distortion of the truth.
 
One reason why we respond so warmly to the parable of the Prodigal Son is the image it gives us of God the Father. There is no anger in this Father. And that must be the truth. What we envisage as the anger of God is a projection onto God of our own profound unhappiness at our separation from God – our status as ‘sinners’.  There is no wrath in God, and likewise there can be no separation between the Father and the Son. Jesus does not stand as Moses does in the role of the one who deflects the wrath of the Father. Jesus the Son always acts in harmony with the Father. The quality of God which became apparent to St Paul when he recognised himself as the greatest of sinners was the quality of God’s mercy. It was the quality of God’s inexhaustible patience. And it is precisely this quality of God which emerges in those two short parables with which today’s Gospel begins.
 
‘God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son…’ ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.’ The really extraordinary truth at the heart of our faith is that God does not simply stand like the Father of Prodigal looking our for his return and running to meet him. The really extraordinary truth is that God himself comes to meet us in our sinfulness. God never abandons us, but searches for us and indeed for the whole human race both collectively and individually. He comes down to our level, he shares our humanity. He searches for us as diligently as a shepherd might search for a lost sheep, or a woman might turn the house upside down to find a precious missing coin. The action of the Father and the Son is one act of inexhaustibly patient and inexhaustibly hopeful love and mercy. And the end of it all is joy. ‘Rejoice with me… I have found that which was lost.’ Well might St Paul conclude his own reflection on God’s saving mercy with those thrilling words: ‘To the eternal King, the undying, invisible and only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.’

THE ASSUMPTION of OUR LADY (2010)

Oxford seems to be more than ever full of visitors. I hope they are having a lovely time. While they explore our city, we may well be off to explore theirs, or some other corner of this or another country. Or, sadly, we may already have returned from holiday and be facing another year of the daily routine. If you fit, now or occasionally, into the category of ‘tourist’, I wonder what sort of tourist you are? There are those who buy and study the guide-books. There are those who try to identify every detail of the ancient building they are visiting, and carefully read up on its history. That is one sort of temperament. And then there is another sort – the sort who wander into the building and just stand there soaking up the atmosphere. They aren’t really interested in the detail. They are vaguely aware of a rich confusion of styles and shapes, colours and textures which make up the whole. They absorb the whole thing by a kind of intuition. I must confess that I find myself generally very much in this latter category.
 
It seems to me that one can adopt either of these attitudes to the feast which we are celebrating today.  I remember some years ago trying to be the first sort of tourist in the face of that extraordinary First Reading. Attempting to unpack the details of it a bit, and to show how it linked with various bits of the Old Testament, although it is of course taken from the very last book of the New Testament. But you can simply let it pour over you, a great cosmic vision with this extraordinary woman at the heart of it. A vision of light and darkness; a vision of pain and conflict; a vision of rescue from disaster, not only embracing the world we inhabit, but taking in the the sun and the moon and the stars as well. It seems to reflect a world of pagan myths and ancient sagas as well as giving glimpses of the history of God’s chosen people Israel as they struggled towards the moment of the birth of the Messiah.
 
All that is jumbled together, and yet it begins with a moment of great peace – ‘the sanctuary of God in heaven opened, and the ark of the covenant was seen inside it.’ It begins with a little glimpse into the glory of heaven and the very presence of God; a glimpse of the ark of the covenant which was the symbol of God’s presence in the temple, and so a glimpse too of the glory of heaven and Mary within it – Mary who was the ark of the new covenant, the one who bore within her the very presence of God. As Elizabeth cries out in the Gospel, ‘Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’ That First reading begins with that glimpse into the heart of heaven, and ends with a great cry of triumph, ‘Victory and power and empire for ever have been won by our God, and all authority for his Christ.’  We get a glimpse of heaven; we get a little taste of the ultimate triumph of God’s labour of salvation and redemption; we get a little assurance that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’.
 
‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ It sounds, perhaps, almost blasphemous to repeat those well-known words of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English mystic, and to dwell on that vision of hope at a moment when millions of people in Pakistan are caught up in floods which must seem to them like the time of Noah. Floods in which their whole world is lost. Floods which make it almost impossible even to bring help. That is part of our world too, as well as the world of tourism and holidays. But even as from our comfortable standpoint we open ourselves just a little to the despair of our brothers and sisters, we still do so in a spirit of hope; we still do so even hoping against hope. We do so in that spirit of hope which runs through, and lies behind, today’s Gospel. Elizabeth who was barren is about to give birth; Mary comes from hearing the words of the angel, ‘Nothing is impossible for God’, and hears the words of Elizabeth, ‘Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled’.
 
The First Reading presents us with a picture of God’s cosmic creative struggle and victory which has near to its heart the glory of Mary in heaven. But the Gospel links that to a very different sort of picture – the picture of the intimate encounter of two pregnant women in the hill country of Judah. We are not here in the realm of myth and symbol, although it is through myth and symbol that we are often helped to make sense of history and of our world. In this encounter of Mary and Elizabeth we are brought down to earth. Our feet are planted in the hill country of Judah. If we can continue to hope in the face of flood, of famine, of war, of vicious disease assaulting young people in their prime – if we can continue to hope, it is because of those feet planted on the hill country of Judah, and because of that almighty kick that John the Baptist gave his mother when her eyes beheld the mother of her Lord.
 
And out of that encounter comes Mary’s Magnificat. She gives glory to God, but she also proclaims, as she also quite literally embodies, the scandalous way in which God actually works in his world. The proud and the powerful are routed; the humble are exalted. And it isn’t just some dream of reversal and revenge, although we find traces of that in the Old Testament, and not least in the Psalms. It is in fact the way that the humble love of God actually works. The God who created the ground we stand on redeems and saves that world, redeems and saves us, by humbly planting his feet firmly on that same ground at a particular time and place. And indeed, even more humbly – but such must be the way of love – even more humbly waits upon the response of  a young woman of apparently total insignificance in order to do so: ‘I am the Lord’s servant; let it be to me as you have said.’
 
But by the time of today’s Gospel things have moved on from that moment of Annunciation. In her Magnificat Mary not only grasps the mystery of the child in her womb. She also sees beyond the present to the ultimate fulfilment of God’s promise of mercy to all generations and to all peoples; to the time when in every sense the hungry will be filled and those apparently of no account will be honoured, because they too are made in the image of God. Today we in our generation call this mother blessed for what God has done in her; we rejoice in her exaltation to the glory of heaven. But just as the joy expressed in her Magnificat was not joy for herself alone, so our joy as we celebrate the fullness of her presence with her Son is not only about Mary. As the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer for this feast so clearly says, the Assumption of Mary into heaven is ‘the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its perfection, and a sign of hope and comfort for your people on their pilgrim way’.  On this feast we rejoice at the glory of Mary. It is a glory which does not close her eyes, or ours, to the suffering of the world. But it is a glory which enables us to face that suffering, as far as we are able to at all, with eyes of faith, eyes that are confident of the ultimate victory of God’s love.  
   

18th SUNDAY of YEAR C (2010)

I have to confess that I am not as familiar with the plays of Shakespeare as I ought to be – or even as I would like to be. On the fairly rare occasions when I attend a performance of one of them, one of the striking things is that they are full of familiar proverbs; phrases that have just passed into our language so that they don’t feel like a quotation. I suppose ‘salad days’ would be an obvious example. Well, today’s readings are rather the same. ‘Vanity of vanities’ the Preacher says. And from the Gospel, ‘eat, drink and be merry’.
 
Ecclesiastes, from which our First Reading comes, is a strange book. Perhaps it often seems strange to finish an Old Testament reading with ‘This is the Word of the Lord’, but today it may have felt especially strange. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ – is that really the message the Lord has for us today? You can take it two ways. You could see it simply as a cry of total pessimism. Life is just empty, meaningless. I might as well be dead. That cannot be the Word of the Lord. Or you could take it as underlining that contrast which is expressed so vividly at the end of the Gospel. ‘So is it when a man stores up treasure for himself, in place of making himself rich in the sight of God.’ You could hear it as saying that the things of this world are just empty and valueless; all that matters is that we concentrate on the riches of God, on the riches that God will give in the life of heaven. Perhaps that just could be the Word of the Lord.
 
You could take it that way, but I think that in fact that too would be a distortion of both the First Reading and the Gospel. Ecclesiastes expresses that strand of Jewish thought which did not believe that there was life after death. So ‘vanity of vanities’ cannot in fact be contrasting this life with the next. More might be said about Ecclesiastes, a book which could be said to be concerned with that very modern pre-occupation, ‘the work/life balance’, but I shall leave it there.
 
But I think it would also be wrong to see the Gospel today as simply contrasting this world’s riches with the riches of heaven. It is one of Richard Dawkins’ criticisms of the Christian faith that it stops people recognising the wonder of this world because it is trying to focus on another world, a world beyond. If that were true, I think he would be right. But as so often, what he is attacking is actually a distortion of the Faith. It is fundamental to Christian faith that this world is God’s good creation. What we call ‘the Fall’ has distorted that goodness; there is much in this world that is not as God intended it to be. But nothing must be allowed to destroy our sense of the fundamental goodness of God’s creation.
 
It is one of the troubles of our present age that the secular world has lost the sense of the tension between the fundamental goodness of God’s creation and the fact that something has gone seriously wrong with it. If you lose the sense of that tension, you have two options. One is this. You can look at the toil and suffering of the world and say quite simply ‘vanity of vanities’. The whole thing is a disaster. The sooner it all comes to an end the better. Sadly, some people take that view and act on it. But, fortunately, most people don’t. So they look at the glory and the mess of the world and see it all as more or less indistinguishable. Whatever goes on, broadly speaking, must be what is meant to go on. They have no way of judging what belongs to that fundamental goodness, and what is part of the distortion of that goodness - distortion by what as Christians we acknowledge to be sin and evil.
 
It is exactly this tension that St Paul picks up in the Second Reading. It is indeed the fundamental tension within which we live our lives as Christians. It sounds as if St Paul is drawing a contrast between our life here in this world and the next life, the life of heaven. ‘You must look for the things that are in heaven, not on the things that are on the earth.’ What could be clearer, you might think. But in fact he doesn’t speak of ‘heaven’ in the sense in which we often use it – ‘the place you go (please God) when you die.’ The crucial phrase is ‘heaven, where Christ is’. ‘Where Christ is’ – that is St Paul’s definition of heaven. And the heart of St Paul’s faith, and ours, is that the crucified Christ has been raised from the dead. He is alive. He is alive with a life which has been victorious over evil and sin and death. He has risen above all these things which drag us down, which keep us earthbound in the sense of keeping us bogged down. And St Paul’s faith and ours is that we too have been raised up above these things by being linked to the risen Christ. ‘You have been brought back to true life in Christ’ we heard in the reading. The risen Christ literally embodies ‘true life’. He embodies human life as God intended it to be. As St Paul says elsewhere, ‘In Christ there is a new creation’. One Old Testament reading at Mass last week was Jeremiah’s picture of God as a potter. The potter taking the clay of the pot that had gone wrong, and reworking it into a pot with the shape he really intended. In Jesus Christ from the moment of his conception, but clearly visible in Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead – in the humanity of Jesus Christ God the Potter has remade the human race.
 
Quite often the intention of our Sunday Mass is someone who has died. They may have died recently, or it may be an anniversary Mass. In the Mass we are linking them to Jesus in his death and resurrection, and praying that through that key event in the history of the world, that particular person may come to share completely and perfectly in the renewed humanity of Jesus taken up into the life and love of God. We pray that they may come to enjoy fullness of life in heaven with all the saints. But have you noticed the words we use about them in the Eucharistic Prayer on these occasions? We don’t say ‘so-and-so died last week, and we pray that now he will at last be able to share in the life of Christ risen from the dead.’  We say something much more extraordinary. We say quite simply ‘In Baptism he died with Christ, may he also share his resurrection.’ The link to the new humanity – humanity redeemed and renewed in Jesus Christ – that link begins with our Baptism. We are called to live the ‘Christ-life’ here and now. We are called to live in a way which totally reflects the renewed humanity of the risen Jesus which we now share.
 
‘Quite impossible’ you might say. And in a sense you would be right. Quite impossible without that real link to Christ provided by our Baptism. Quite impossible without that constantly renewed link provided by the Mass, and Holy Communion. Quite impossible, in short, by our own efforts, but in principle possible by God’s gift of himself, God’s gift in Christ of his life; possible by what we call God’s grace. St Paul sums all that up beautifully today in that little phrase, ‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God’. That is the fundamental truth about each of us here and now. That is our reality.
 
But St Paul also talks about ‘progress’, about a gradual movement towards the restoration of God’s image in us. And that too is very much our experience. You could read today’s Second Reading as a whole lot of instructions about how to behave. Things you ought not to get up to. You could focus on the ethical teaching, as people often do, leaving out the basis on which that teaching is given. That teaching is important, and it ends with a wonderful vision of the oneness of the renewed human race in Christ – all barriers broken down. When all that happens the Kingdom of God will have arrived. But it won’t happen just because we think it is a good idea and we work for it. We do indeed have to work for it. We do have to discipline our behaviour in all sorts of ways if we are serious about living out our Christian calling. That is certainly true.
 
But the ‘motive power’, so to speak, is not ours, but God’s. In the end, it all stems from what God has done in Jesus Christ, from that event which is made really present for us sacramentally in the Mass. In the end we will achieve nothing except in so far as we are united to the risen Christ who is our life; we will achieve nothing unless in our still-broken humanity we are united to that humanity which God has redeemed and renewed in Jesus Christ – Jesus Christ who (as St Paul says in that extraordinary phrase) ‘is everything and in everything’. 

16th SUNDAY of YEAR C (2010)

Last time the Gospel of Martha and Mary was read at Mass, I remember trying to reassure someone that Martha too was a saint. I certainly don’t regret taking that line on that occasion, and it is certainly true that not everyone is called to what might be formally called ‘the contemplative life’. There have been times in the history of the Church when the life of contemplation has been exalted above what we call ‘the active life’. In that understanding, ninety-nine per cent of us – those who have no alternative to leading lives of great busyness –  are immediately demoted to the status of being at best second-class Christians. Today’s Gospel is certainly not intended as a ‘put-down’ for Marthas. Today’s Gospel is not intended to increase your guilt level; it is not intended to make you feel that the whole business of trying to live a Christian life in your circumstances is just hopeless.
 
So how does it speak to those of us who are ‘distracted with all the serving’? That very phrase is a wonderfully vivid one; it encapsulates, I suspect, what our lives feel like a lot of the time. However hard you work; however devotedly you stick to the tasks that have to be done around the house; however late you stay up at night, you never actually get to the end of the agenda. And on top of that there are all the people one might visit if time; the letters one might write or calls one might make to neglected friends. That, surely, is the reality of life for many of us, and it could easily be enough to make us despair.
 
It is, I believe, exactly to that condition that today’s Gospel speaks. Indeed it is exactly to us in that condition that Jesus speaks in the Gospel. ‘Mary sat down at the Lord’s feet, and listened to him speaking.’ What St Luke actually says is that she sat and listened to ‘his word’. ‘In the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh and lived among us’. We are familiar with that text at the beginning of St John’s Gospel. You could say that today’s Gospel provides us with a vivid picture of exactly that. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh; Jesus is the truth of God that can be encountered in his human person. And Mary - who probably could also have been  completely submerged in the busyness of life – Mary is taking time to hear that Word. Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to him speaking.
 
And Jesus says to Martha, who is worrying and fretting, ‘Mary has chosen the better part; it is not to be taken from her’. It does sound as if the busyness is in itself condemned and Mary’s behaviour exalted. But I don’t think we should hear it like that. It might be more helpful to think of Martha and Mary as embodying two aspects of life. One aspect is inevitable – the busyness, the distractedness. The other is, alas, not inevitable, but certainly essential for us all. The other is the central of focus our life. It is the thing in our life which unifies all the multiplicity of activity; the thing which gives some overall sense and meaning to it. And ultimately the only thing which does that is what Mary does. The only person, ultimately, who provides that is Jesus, the Word of God who became flesh and lived among us; Jesus in whom God restores humanity, restores us, to our true centre. Jesus in whom the image of the invisible God in humanity is restored. Jesus who leads us back to our true home.
 
‘Mary sat down at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking.’ Somehow that focus has to be incorporated in the life we actually lead. We can’t all become desert hermits or contemplative nuns. We can’t all take hours and hours for personal prayer. But every one of us, whatever our circumstances is called to find the unifying focus of our life around Jesus the word of God revealed in the midst of our humanity; Jesus the word of God made flesh. How can we do that?
 
I said earlier that this little Gospel picture of Jesus, Martha and Mary is a sort of visual image of what St John says at the beginning of his Gospel: ‘the Word was made flesh and lived among us’. Taking that a little further, we should perhaps note the beginning of the story as we have it in today’s Gospel. ‘Jesus came to a village.’ The whole thing happens because Jesus comes there. The starting point is not our response, but the action of God. ‘Herein is love’, says St John elsewhere, ‘not that we love God, but that he loved us’. He loved us first and sent his Son. In Jesus God comes to find us. Everything we do is a response to that amazing reality.
 
In the Second Reading St Paul gives us some background to that. This, he says, is the mystery hidden for generations and now revealed. Revealed to a small group, but with a view to revealing the glory of God to all nations, to all peoples. God who loves not just us, but all humanity, works in and through human history. The preparation for his revelation in Jesus took generations and centuries, but it doesn’t mean that God wasn’t concerned for all those people. His ultimate purpose for them must have been the same. The ultimate purpose of God for humanity is expressed in that wonderful phrase of St Paul, ‘Christ among you, Christ in you, the hope of glory’.  In Christ, our humanity is renewed, restored and caught up into the glory of God. Through our baptism, through our being in Christ, we are caught up into the glory of God. That is the context in which all our busyness and all our distraction is set. That is the truth about us; that is the reality. It may be largely invisible, but it is the reality.
 
So the question is not ‘how do I begin to make the faith I profess a reality in my busy life?’. The question is ‘How do I help the reality to appear, to make itself visible?’ The issue is not how do we move from being pretend Christians to real ones. We are all real ones. But we all have a way to go as we seek to integrate all the scattered, distracted bits of our lives into the unity of Christ. St Paul talks about this long and gradual process at the end of the reading – a process of training towards being ‘perfect in Christ’.
 
‘Mary sat down at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking’. That was what she needed to do at that point to help that process of integration. We all need to ask ourselves what we need to do – within the possibilities which are available to us. There are, of course, certain things which the Church firmly says are God-given gifts we should not neglect. The Mass, supremely, is the sacramental embodiment of ‘Christ among you, Christ in you, the hope of glory.’ It is the weekly opportunity to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to his word. And beyond that, it is the weekly opportunity to set forth the central mystery of his redeeming death and to be intimately united with him in his risen life. If we fail to give priority to this, we do so at our peril. In addition, there are other opportunities to sit at the Lord’s feet and listen. The Tuesday evening hour of Adoration recently introduced in this parish is just one example. Booklets with daily scripture readings can help. The Rosary is a way of sitting at the Lord’s feet in the company of a different Mary from the one in the Gospel.
 
We each need to find our own pattern, according to our temperament and our opportunity. But the crucial thing is to realise that ‘the practices of our faith’, whether it is taking part in the Mass, taking time for prayer on our own, or any other religious exercises, are not just ‘another item of the agenda to be ticked off’. They are not just one more distraction in our distracted lives. They are the point at which we come to the feet of the Lord and begin to let him draw our scattered lives into a unity. They are the means by which I discover the mystery of Christ among us, indeed Christ in you and in me; ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’.   

13th SUNDAY of Year C

I suppose that one of the most disagreeable features of religion is fanaticism. In the past it has certainly manifested itself in a Christian context, and still does in some places. We are probably more conscious of it these days as Islamic fanaticism or even Hindu fanaticism. There are, I suspect, a good many people who fear that all religion has a tendency to breed fanaticism, and it is very unattractive and profoundly un-English. Possibly un-British. The natural character of inhabitants of these islands is moderation. We queue in an orderly fashion in a way which astonishes some of our continental neighbours. We are happy to be Christian, and indeed Catholic, but we prefer not to make waves. A moderate degree of religion is a good thing, and has, on the whole, a positive influence on our behaviour. But there is a widespread feeling, even among believers, I suspect, that one can take one’s religion too far.
 
Some people have memories of religion taken too far. They remember God being invoked in their childhood to inspire terror and to enforce conformity. Many such people have very understandably rejected the terrifying God who was only too ready to condemn them to Hell. Many of them recognise that there are valuable elements of morality in Christian teaching, and are happy for their children to be exposed to these. But to cease to believe in this vindictive and angry God has been a liberation.
 
Against such teaching there has been a strong reaction. Very few preachers say much about Hell these days, although it retains a place, a proper if minor place, in the Catholic Catechism. The whole emphasis these days is on the fundamental truth that God is love. God is a loving Father. The model for God’s love is parental love, and parental love, these days, is generally expressed in a pretty indulgent attitude to children. Few parents, it seems, have the confidence to impose discipline of any severity on their children. If God was once understood as a terrifying disciplinarian, he is now often understood as a very indulgent parent. A loving God will understand. A loving God will not make too many demands. A loving God will more or less let me get on with my life as I want to live it. We rightly take great comfort from the story of the shepherd who seeks out the lost sheep and carries it home on his shoulder; from the welcome given by the father to the prodigal son; from the word of Jesus to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Neither do I condemn you’. Would it be too much to say that we have moved from a religion of control to a religion of comfort? 
 
If there is any truth in that, then today’s Gospel may have come to us as a bit of a shock. Jesus is resolutely taking the road to Jerusalem, and this for the last time. ‘The time drew near for him to be taken up to heaven’ says St Luke. But we all know that it isn’t as simple as that. Between this journey to Jerusalem and his being taken up into heaven lies the Passion. He is on the road to the ultimate challenge to the powers of this world, and to the Cross. That is an inescapable part of the Christian story – the story which has, however, at its heart the supreme truth that the very nature of God is love. The Cross doesn’t fit in particularly well with a religion of comfort.
 
But the next bit of today’s Gospel is reassuring. If you were looking for traces of religious fanaticism in the New Testament, this is one of the places where you might find it. The inhabitants of a Samaritan village would not receive Jesus because he was going up to Jerusalem. Samaritans had a quarrel with the Jews, because the Jews believed that all true worship should be concentrated in the Jerusalem temple. But Jesus rebuked his disciples for the fanatical suggestion that they should ask God to annihilate them. He simply took an alternative route. The followers of Jesus are not called to fanaticism.
 
We are not called to be fanatics; we are not called to destroy those who oppose us. But what follows in the Gospel is not altogether comfortable. “I will follow you wherever you go” says the enthusiastic would-be disciple. There may have been moments when we have been seized with a similar enthusiasm; I hope so. How good if we are moved to say to ourselves, ‘This person Jesus is so wonderful that I really want to be continually in his company’. But the reply of Jesus is uncompromising. It is poetical, but challenging. “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  As we sing in that moving hymn, ‘In life, no house, no home, my Lord on earth might have’. He has no permanent resting-place except in his Father’s house. His one, absolutely over-riding priority is to do the will of his Father. Everything else is subject to that. That is the priority of Jesus around which everything else is ordered. And his followers are called to share that priority as well. ‘Our Father who art in heaven…thy will be done.’ That is the heart of the prayer we use more often than any other. It trips so easily off the tongue that we don’t realise what a radical prayer it is.
 
We have been called to be followers of Jesus. ‘Another to whom Jesus said, “ Follow me” replied, “Let me go any bury my father first.” The response of Jesus is shocking. Burying the dead, and a parent especially, is an over-riding religious duty. Can you imagine anything more cruel and insensitive than to refuse such a request? Yet Jesus says “Your duty is to go and spread the news of the Kingdom of God.” The Gospels as a whole witness to the fact that Jesus is not without compassion. He is supremely compassionate, both to human need and to human weakness. But with this absolute centrality and priority of God and his kingdom there can be no compromise. “Once the hand is laid to the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
 
All of us, surely, look back constantly. Perhaps we don’t exactly look back, but sideways. We don’t say ‘I wish I had never committed myself to following Jesus’. But we do compromise. And we can’t live the kind of footloose, homeless life that Jesus lived. We have responsibilities. We have families. We have mortgages. We have to make plans for life in this world. But there is a difference between living in a way which is simply worldly and then hoping that a loving and indulgent God will understand and bless it – there is a difference between that and seeking to put God at the centre. That means asking of every life decision, however apparently secular, ‘What is more to the glory of God?’ It means really putting the Lord’s Prayer at the centre of my life. ‘Hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done.’ And if that sometimes seems like a burden, even a form of slavery, our faith tells us that it is in fact the path of freedom and the path of life. As St Paul says, we are called to liberty.
 
We follow Jesus – Jesus who trusted utterly that his Father’s purposes for him, and indeed for all, were purposes of love. Our God seeks nothing but our good. He did then, as Jesus resolutely took the road to Jerusalem. The same God still does so now. He seeks nothing but our good. That is still true, for you and for me, today. 
 

11th SUNDAY of YEAR C (2010)

Last Friday was the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It also marked the end of ‘The Year of the Priest’. In the course of his homily at the closing Mass, Pope Benedict reflected on the fact that the Year has been particularly marked by the exposure of the sins and weaknesses of priests. Reaction to this exposure can, I think, be linked to the theme of today’s readings.
 
The evils exposed have caused justified outrage, even though they are the actions of a tiny minority. That outrage would have been there in any context, but people generally feel it more strongly because the context of the evil is the Church. Even without the help of these revelations, it is common for people who are outside the Church to condemn those within as ‘hypocrites’. The assumption is that those within the Church are, or should be, ‘whiter than white’. But of course they are not.  The Church becomes a symbol of an unattainable perfection. When the reality is revealed, and the dream is shattered, the idealised institution is inevitably seen not as ‘whiter than white’, but as ‘blacker than black’.
 
The same process can take place within the Church itself. St Thérèse of Lisieux as a child wondered how she could possibly be called to pray for priests; they were so transparently holy that they couldn’t need praying for at all. Happily, the scales subsequently fell from her eyes. In this context, while in no way condoning the sins of priests, Pope Benedict quotes St Paul: ‘we have this treasure in earthen vessels’. It is a text which is particularly applicable to priests and clergy generally – all those who are marked out as ‘official representatives’ of the Church. But it is true of us all.
 
When the ideal slips, what was ‘whiter than white’ becomes ‘blacker than black’. But there is a related process which is often visible in the media. It appears there, I suspect, because it accurately reflects a pretty natural human reaction. When the newspapers express outrage on our behalf, they naturally place us in the position of the virtuous. We would simply have nothing to do with that kind of behaviour. We are simply above it. We condemn from a great height.
 
It is this very human process which is reflected, I believe, in today’s readings. In the Second Reading from his letter to the Galatians, St Paul is talking about an argument he had with St Peter. The argument was about whether those who were not Jews by birth, but had become followers of Jesus Christ, were obliged to keep the Jewish law. Did gentile Christians have, in effect, to become Jews as well? Unfortunately, the reading as we have it chops off the beginning of the first sentence. There, St Paul, himself a Jew, begins by saying ‘We were born Jews, and not gentile sinners…’.He makes an absolute distinction between Jews and gentiles. Jews are Jews, and gentiles – well, gentiles are quite simply ‘sinners’.
 
The issue at stake is ‘justification’. The issue is, ‘What puts us in a right relationship with God?’. The opposite of being ‘justified’ is being a ‘sinner’. The essence of sin is that it separates us from God. To be ‘justified’ is to have that relationship with God restored. The assumption St Paul is working with is a very simple one. Jews are righteous; Jews are God’s special, chosen people; Jews have a right relationship with God. The rest – the gentiles – the rest of humanity are just sinners. They are beyond the pale. St Paul doesn’t believe it, of course. His conversion to Christ was precisely about discovering that it was not true. God was not like that. The great gift of God which St Paul discovered in Christ was that justification – reconciliation with God – was available not just to Jews but to all people, to all humanity. But in this passage he is starting from the point both St Peter and he started from. It was their natural starting point, for they were both Jews by birth.
 
In the Second Reading, St Paul is in effect having an argument with St Peter. But in that wonderful Gospel we heard today, you could say that exactly the same point is being made, but in a much more pictorial way.
I don’t know how you naturally imagine this particular dinner party. It only works, I think, if you imagine that the guests are not sitting up to a table, but reclining with feet away from the table. It never seems to me a particularly comfortable position for eating, but that was, I think, how things were done in that time and place. One side of the room must have been open either to the street or to a courtyard; the woman had to be able to get in, and indeed reach the feet of Jesus, without causing major disruption. Simon the Pharisee – Simon the host of the party – must have been on the far side of the table, opposite Jesus. He could see what was going on, and Jesus was between him and the woman.
 
Simon is a Pharisee – as indeed was St Paul. He was a Jew who tried to keep every bit of the Jewish law. He was an extremely observant Jew, and no doubt proud of it. It may be that he had invited Jesus to a meal partly to test him out. He doesn’t seem to have treated him very well. He hadn’t bothered with the usual welcoming ceremonies for guests. Was this wandering teacher a prophet of God or not? The immediate evidence was that he certainly wasn’t. ‘If this man were a prophet, he’d have realised immediately who this intruder was…’. She may have been a Jew, but even if she was, she was certainly a sinner. She was in the same position as the gentiles. She was beyond the pale.
 
And yet she gate-crashes this dinner-party with an extravagant demonstration of love and gratitude towards Jesus. And what is the reason? Jesus has at some earlier point revealed to this sinner, this outcast, that she is in fact loved by God. Her sins are forgiven. She is reconciled, justified. The barrier between her and God has been torn down. She would not have been able to articulate her position as St Paul did, but she could at this point have said with St Paul, ‘The life I now live in this body I live in faith: faith in the Son of God who loved me, and who sacrificed himself for my sake.’
 
Simon the Pharisee was an upright man. He was a good citizen, no doubt. He was outraged by the improper behaviour of this loose woman. We too are, by and large, good citizens. We have moral standards. We might well judge ourselves, and indeed be judged by others, to be ‘good people’. We probably wouldn’t want to hear it said about us, and if we did hear it, we would dismiss it. Partly out of a sort of modesty; partly because we know a bit more about what goes on inside us than we let on. But why did that woman make such an embarrassingly emotional demonstration of love at that dinner party? It was because she had made a discovery which lies absolutely at the heart of our faith – at the heart of the Gospel, the Good News.
 
 She had discovered that in fact we are all on the same side of the dinner table. We are all, however virtuous we may look – we are all on her side. Even when we have to make judgements about the conduct of others, as we inevitably do, we do so from her side of the table. We are all sinners, and yet we are all embraced by God’s love right there – in our sinfulness. We are all embraced by God’s love, embraced where we are, despite all our shortcomings. God comes in love to find us. God comes to embrace us as we are. That is what makes change possible. ‘I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ who lives in me.’  But that embrace of love was costly. We don’t forget that it was costly, because we gather each week to remember that cost. That cost, freely paid, and paid out of love alone, was the Cross.
   

Solemnity of the HOLY TRINITY (Yr C) 2010

Last Thursday I went to London, for the annual gathering organised by the Spirituality Committee of the Bishops’ Conference. We gather as representatives of every diocese in England and Wales, and I am fortunate enough to be asked as the convenor of the ‘Spirituality Development Group’ within our Diocese. This is a small group of busy people, and it only meets four times a year, so it doesn’t make a particularly big impression; most of you will never have heard of it. But over the years we have promoted Weeks of Guided Prayer in parishes; we encourage spiritual direction; recently we promoted a leaflet about resources for personal prayer to be found on the internet. You may have seen this at the back of the church. Somebody who came to see me this week reminded me about the internet site they found particularly helpful, called ‘www.pray-as-you-go’. It really is well worth a visit. Google ‘pray as you go’ and you will be there.
 
That’s the end of the commercial. I mention this gathering because at it we heard a wonderful talk by Fr James Hanvey, the superior of the Jesuit Provincial House in London. He said many striking things, but one of them was that he thought perhaps that our culture was a culture in mourning. He even said that we were perhaps a Church in mourning. He even risked saying that he thought that Pope Benedict was possibly a Pope in mourning.
 
I suppose one reason that this struck me particularly was that we are at this moment a parish in mourning. Perhaps not all of us to the same degree. But all of us have been praying over the past year and more for Pauline Grant-Adamson and her young family. As you will be aware, after all those months of courageous and full living despite her illness, last Tuesday she died. So we are all to some degree in mourning, and very much with her family at this time.
 
But what did Fr Hanvey mean by a culture, and even a church, in mourning? He was speaking about the loss of an overall vision of the meaning of life. He had the impression, he said, that many younger people were in mourning because they had a sense that they had missed out on a time when there had been some shared overall vision. They felt in some way short-changed. Of course this sense of an earlier and more secure age may be to a large degree a fantasy. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t mourn its loss.
 
When he spoke about the Church and the Pope in mourning he didn’t, I think, mean quite the same. He wasn’t however talking about recent crimes and scandals. I think he was talking about a certain loss of a sense of the transcendent mystery of God. The introduction of a new English translation of the Mass texts is, I think, one attempt to move back in this direction. How effective it will be is another matter, and the moment of change seems to have been put off once again; I’m pretty sure it won’t be this year.
 
Fr Hanvey was talking about the loss of a sense of the mystery of God, but also of the loss in the secular world of any desire for a total picture of reality. The question, ‘What does it all mean?’ is simply not being asked. It is a huge generalisation, but these days people are content to carve out little bits of meaning out of little bits of their lives and relationships. The big questions are simply not being asked. The Church is in mourning for a time when the big questions were being asked, because it is to these big questions that the Christian Gospel speaks. It is, in fact, equally concerned with the events of every day, with the small scale. But it links them with the big picture.
 
It is hard to talk about the Wisdom of God, as our First Reading does this Sunday; it is hard to talk about ‘peace with God through Jesus Christ’ as our Second Reading does; it is hard to talk about ‘the Spirit of truth leading you into all truth’ as today’s Gospel does; it is harder to talk about these things when people naturally don’t want to look for ‘salvation’ beyond their day-to-day life and their immediate relationships.
 
If this is true, what lies behind it? There are two things which come to mind. The first is what we call ‘post-modernism’ – the sense that it is no longer possible to talk about ‘the truth’, but only about ‘what is true for you’ and ‘what is true for me’. The second is the materialism which is trumpeted by Richard Dawkins and his friends. Delving into myself, I find that I am surprisingly susceptible to this point of view – this view that ‘in fact’ there is nothing but ‘matter’. Perhaps the popularity of Richard Dawkins is not due to the brilliance of his arguments, but to the fact that he has struck a vein of materialistic atheism which runs deeper in our culture generally than we might suppose. In fact his arguments are extraordinarily poor when he steps beyond his field of professional competence. But still he strikes a chord.  And if there is nothing but matter – matter going nowhere; if that is all there is, then all I can do is carve out little islands of meaning and contentment for myself in the midst of the meaningless chaos.
 
A culture in mourning; a church in mourning. What a subject for the celebration of the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity! But, says St Paul to us today, ‘we can boast about our sufferings’. In that Second Reading today St Paul gives us a wonderful summary of the great truths of our faith. Through our Lord Jesus Christ we come to peace with God, we come into that place of grace where we can look forward to sharing in the glory of God. And even now the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit – the Holy Spirit who takes the love which belongs between the Father and the Son and shares it with us. The mystery of God is not some distant mystery from which we are separated by an unbridgeable gulf. The mystery of God is a mystery of love which not only creates us and holds us in being, but a mystery of love which seeks us out and comes alongside us in our humanity. And not only a mystery of love which has sought us out and come alongside us in Jesus - Jesus the Son, the Word, the Wisdom of God. Also a mystery of love which continues to embrace us and draw us into unity with Jesus the Word and Wisdom of God through the action of the Holy Spirit.
 
Richard Dawkins is a truly religious man. He still looks for, and proclaims, a total world-view, albeit a materialist one. His popularity in fact suggests that total visions have not lost their power to attract. But it is not easy to hold on to Christian faith in the current climate. The suffering St Paul speaks of is the suffering which comes from being pinched or squeezed. That is the root meaning of the word he uses for ‘sufferings’. Something like that is what our culture does to us and our faith. We may be part of a culture in mourning; we may be part of a Church in mourning. But, patience, says St Paul. Stay with it. If you do so the value of your faith will emerge from that testing. The truth of it will appear, and the hope that goes with that truth.  ‘And that hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.’  
        

PENTECOST and First Holy Communion

I haven’t seen it, and I probably shouldn’t be reminding you of it at this moment, but I rather think that next door in the Rosary Room, waiting for you, is a rather lovely cake. Which makes today a bit like a birthday party. It isn’t a birthday party – at least not for the eight of you who will be receiving Holy Communion for the first time at Mass this morning. It is for you all a very special occasion, certainly. But for you it isn’t a birthday party. But if it isn’t a birthday party for you, it is a birthday party for the Church. On this day the whole Church all over the world is celebrating the gift of God’s Holy Spirit. We heard the story in the First Reading. The Apostles were all there in a room with Mary the Mother of Jesus, and suddenly they were given the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit came on them with amazing, powerful signs of wind and fire. Through the Holy Spirit the Church gathered in that room was linked again to Jesus, just as he had promised. At that moment, the Church was born.  So today, the Feast of Pentecost, is the Church’s birthday.
 
Jesus had risen from the dead at Easter; he had returned to his heavenly Father by his Ascension – that’s what we celebrated last week. But before he went away he told them to wait in Jerusalem, to stay where they were, until they were linked to Jesus again by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Church’s birthday is when the followers of Jesus were linked up again to the risen Jesus through the action of the Holy Spirit.  Because we can’t do the work of Jesus, we can’t share the love of Jesus with others, we can’t tell the good news of Jesus, unless we are really connected with him. We can’t do it by ourselves; we can only do in his power. We can only do it with the life which comes from Jesus himself.
 
Today is the birthday of the Church, but it is also a day for which  eight of you have been preparing carefully for a long time. The moment in Mass you will be thinking about most is the moment when you actually receive Holy Communion. But there is another moment before that which I want you specially to look out for. Sometimes we shut our eyes when we pray – I do sometimes at Mass, too. But sometimes, particularly at Mass, it is a good idea to keep them open. To watch what is happening. The moment I want you to watch for today comes just after we have sung ‘Holy, holy…’. It comes near the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer. It is the moment when I stretch my hands out over the bread and wine on the altar. It is a very important moment, so, provided one of the servers remembers, a bell is rung at that point. The bell says, ‘Wake up; pay attention; this is important.’
 
At that moment I stretch out my hands over the bread and the wine, which are just ordinary bread and wine. And I pray to God our Father on behalf of everyone like this: ‘Father, we bring you these gifts. We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit, that they may become the body and blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.’ I stretch out my hands, and I make the sign of the Cross over the bread and the wine. We are asking the Holy Spirit to come and change this ordinary bread and wine so that it becomes the special way Jesus himself is present with us; the special way God has given us to link us with the life of Jesus. And then I say the words Jesus said at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body’; ‘this is my blood’. And then, by the action of the Holy Spirit, the bread and the wine are no longer bread and wine, although they look just the same. They are the very special way Jesus has given us to link us to him; the special way he shares his life with us. They become ‘God’s greatest gift’. Jesus who during his life on earth could only be present to his followers in one place, has given us this gift so that he can be really present to us, but also to all his millions of followers all over the world. Through the action of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says to us today, ‘This is my Body; here I am; this is ME’.
 
I hope you will pay special attention later on at that moment I have spoken about when the bell will ring. But I hope also that you were listening carefully to the Gospel which Deacon Richard read a moment ago. Because it had some special words in it for you. Jesus speaks in the Gospel of coming and making his home with us. And that is a wonderful way of thinking about Holy Communion. It isn’t just that Jesus is present on the altar or in the tabernacle, so that we go down on our knees and worship him. We do do that. But, much more, Jesus comes and makes his home with us. He doesn’t come just in an outside way. He comes to be our food. In Holy Communion Jesus comes to make a home right in the centre of my being. He isn’t just present with us in Church. We become linked and united to him so that we can live with his life and love with his love. And so that we can do so not only here in church, but when we go out and get on with the rest of our lives.
 
So I hope that when you go out from Mass today, and when you are having a lovely party, you won’t forget what it is all about. Just take a little moment from time to time to say in your heart, ‘Jesus, thank you for coming today to make your home in me.’ And perhaps during next week, perhaps when you may be asked to do something you don’t really want to do, instead of being cross or selfish you might think back to today. The Holy Spirit may remind you of today, as the Gospel says. And instead of being cross or selfish you will be loving with the love of Jesus – Jesus who has made his home in you. If that happens, God will have acted through you, perhaps in a tiny way – God will have acted through you to bring his world closer to the totally loving world God intends; closer to the world for which Jesus gave his body in love on the Cross - Jesus who continues to give his Body to us now; Jesus who through the gift of Holy Communion continues to make his home within us. 
    

The ASCENSION of the LORD (2010)

For the last two Sundays, at least as far as the homilies are concerned, in this parish we have been pretty earthbound. Two weeks ago I spoke about our Bishops’ call to a prayer of penitence, healing and renewal in the face of scandals in the Church. Last week I spoke about the ‘Living Our Faith’ Appeal in the diocese and parish. I am grateful for the generous response to this, which I’m sure will continue; the appeal will continue to feature in some way at Mass for the next few weeks, and I’m sure the generous response will continue as well. But today is the Solemn Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. ‘His Ascension is our glory and our hope’. That is what we prayed a moment ago in the Opening Prayer of the Mass. And St Paul prays in the Second Reading like this: ‘May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ…enlighten the eyes of your minds, so that you can see what hope his call holds for you, what rich glories he has promised…’. Today is a day to look up and hold our heads high. Today is a day for vision. Today is a day for getting hold once again of the big picture.
 
   This year we are reading St Luke’s Gospel. St Luke was also the author of the Acts of the Apostles. So today we have heard the very end of his Gospel, the very end of Part One of the story, and we have also heard the very beginning of Part Two – the very beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. The two books do in fact tell one great story. Not just the story of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection. They tell the bigger story which has that at its very centre. They tell the story of God’s redeeming purpose for the whole world, that purpose which was specifically revealed through the history of Israel, but which embraces all peoples. It is a story which begins from Jerusalem, but ultimately embraces all nations. That is the story of which we are part. That is the story within which we stand today. Each week we come together to recall some part of that story, and to be linked once again to the heart of it, which is the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus the Messiah longed for by the Jews; Jesus the Son of Man, representative of all humanity; Jesus, Son of God - the Word of God who has taken our flesh, shared our humanity, and taken that humanity into the glory of the life of God.
 
   The story of the Ascension has led to some quite comic representations, for example in the stained glass at Fairford in Gloucestershire, or indeed that on the front of our newsletter this week.  But even that fourteenth-century Christian mystic who wrote ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ knew that the Ascension of Christ was not literally a matter of going up rather than down. It was about the risen Christ being taken into the cloud of the glory of God. All those appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples which we read during the Easter season are full of paradox. And no wonder; they are seeking to speak of an unique mystery. The same is true of the Ascension. In terms of the New Testament narrative, it marks the end of the resurrection appearances of Jesus. It marks the end of those encounters between Jesus and his disciples through which they were restored to faith in him after the shattering experience of his passion and death – that shattering experience as a result of which they all deserted him and ran away. The Ascension marks the end of that process of rebuilding faith and confidence, but it does not mark the end of encounters with the risen Lord.
 
   Although they both have the same author, the two accounts we heard today have some interesting differences of detail. In the First Reading, the disciples are rebuked for standing gazing up into heaven. They are rebuked, you might say, for assuming that this is the last contact they will have with the risen Lord. In the Gospel they seem to have got the message. They return to Jerusalem full of joy, and are continually in the temple, praising God. The Lord who has returned to the glory of the Father is very much still with them. He is with them, as he is with us, until the end of the age.
  
  The manner of the presence of Jesus with his disciples after his resurrection was different from the manner of his presence when they accompanied him on his teaching and healing mission; the manner of his presence with us now is different from either of these, but none the less real. We encounter him through his Body the Church, which is also to say that we encounter him in and through each other. We encounter him in his Word proclaimed. We encounter him too, if we are open to that encounter, in those most needy and vulnerable. But there is a certain priority, surely, in that sign of his real presence which he has left us in the Eucharist. It is not that our risen and ascended Lord is in any sense confined and limited by the sign of his Eucharistic Body broken; by the sign of his Blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins. But it is through the encounter with the Lord truly present in the Eucharist that we are kept aware of his presence in other ways.
 
   In any case, as the Readings for this feast make very clear, all this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Surely one of the most important phrases in the Gospel is that little command, ‘Stay in the city… stay until…’. Wait. Wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power from on high. When things have gone wrong for the Church, it can probably be traced to forgetfulness of that command of Jesus. ‘Wait for the Spirit.’ To fail to wait for that power from on high is to act like a Body without a Head. It is through the action of the Holy Spirit that we remain connected to our glorified Lord who has gone before us into the fullness of the life of God.
 
   In that power a repentant Church can and must continue to proclaim both to itself and to the world a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In that power of the Holy Spirit a repentant Church must continue to proclaim that this is God’s world, and to show that through Jesus Christ a way has been opened up to bridge the gulf that separates humanity from God. And on this feast, whatever our weaknesses and failures, we may still rejoice in the exaltation of Christ not only as Head of his Body the Church, but as universal Lord, the one who carries us forward into the new creation; the one in whom God’s ultimate purpose will be fulfilled, ‘the fullness of him who fills all in all.’

5th SUNDAY of EASTER, Year C (2010)

After Mass last Sunday, someone was talking to me about their experience of the Church as a young person, and contrasting it with what young people experience today. For that person, not only had the church community been a source of real warmth and friendship, but the church was accepted as a force for good in society as a whole. Now there was a sense of being beleaguered. If as a young person you revealed that you were a practising Catholic, you would be likely to be greeted with astonishment, if not actually verbally assaulted. Adherence to this institution which is widely perceived to be obviously corrupt has to be defended at every turn, and that defence is far from easy. To stay with the Church today takes real conviction and commitment.
 
Last Sunday you may have picked up a copy of the letter from our Bishops. It is a forthright admission of the sins and crimes of the Church in the area of child abuse. In the light of these, it calls us all to prayer – to prayer for healing, for forgiveness, for renewed dedication. And it quite specifically proposes that we should give time to this prayer on each Friday in May.
 
Someone with whom I also spoke during the past week was puzzled about the Bishops’ suggestion that on these Fridays we should all pray for forgiveness. The truth is, that horrible as these crimes are, those who have committed them are a tiny minority. Each of us is a sinner, but even so, you can’t ask to be forgiven for sins you have not committed. That is true, but the Bishops rightly emphasise the unity of the Body of Christ. As St Paul says in his teaching on the unity of the Body, ‘If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain. And if one part is honoured, all the parts share its joy’ (1 Cor. 12:26). We are not directly implicated in these particular sins and crimes, but we are part of sinful humanity, and we share a particular bond with those who are members of the Body of Christ, whether they are victims or indeed abusers, or people in authority who have behaved in ways which were irresponsible, deceitful and damaging. I expect that on some occasions in the past most of us have felt the joy of belonging to the Catholic Church; even a sense of pride when someone who is a Catholic has been recognised and honoured. If we can share the joy, we must also share the pain and grief. The First Readings during this season come from the Acts of the Apostles, and give us a glimpse of  the very first years of the Church’s life. Today we hear Paul and Barnabas encouraging the disciples to persevere in the faith. There is a stern realism in their words: “We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God.” It is, you might say, par for the course.
 
Today’s Second Reading from the Apocalypse is very different. It  presents us with a great vision of a world made new. A new heaven and a new earth. A world no longer afflicted with all those causes of pain and grief. ‘No more death; no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone.’ The voice from the throne of God says, ‘Now I am making the whole creation new.’ We may now be in the midst of a time of deep mourning and sadness for the sins and failures of the Church, but that is not the last word. The last word is the power of God to renew God’s Creation; the final picture of the Church is not the sorry one which we see today, but the Church as the beautiful bride coming down from God out of heaven, a bride all dressed and ready for Christ her bridegroom. Doesn’t that glorious picture, and that promise of newness, fill us with hope?
 
Well, honestly, at first sight I am not sure that it does. It is no good fantasising about the glorious future if we cannot make a connection between where we are today and where we dream that we may be one day. So is it possible to make that connection? Is it possible to take that vision of a Church and a world made new as a real sign of hope?
 
Simply focussing for a moment on that vision, we can notice two things. The first is that it is God who is making the whole creation new. In the end, it depends on God, not on us, although we certainly have a part to play. The second thing is that this beautiful city is one in which God lives in the midst of humanity and makes his home among us. God’s name is ‘God-with-them’. That has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? ‘His name shall be called Emmanuel, God is with us.’ The God who is at the heart of this vision of a world renewed is the God who took our flesh, shared our humanity, and lived among us. How is God making the whole creation new? Not in the way that the story of Noah’s Flood suggested. Not by simply rubbing the whole thing out and starting again. God is making the whole creation new from within. Our God is not a God of destruction. Our God is a Redeemer. And this takes us to today’s Gospel.
 
 At the beginning of that short Gospel, Jesus makes the extraordinary pronouncement, ‘Now has the Son of Man been glorified’. In Eastertide we are celebrating the glory of the risen Christ. So we naturally hear those words in an Easter context. But that is not the context in which they were delivered. We are actually taken back to the Last Supper. The context is given by the first four words. The Gospel begins, ‘When Judas had gone’. The context of Jesus’ declaration of his glory is the context of his betrayal. The words immediately before our Gospel are quite simply ‘It was night’. It is a moment of total darkness. It is at that moment of total darkness that Jesus declares that he is bathed in the light of the Father’s glory.
 
The Gospel continues with the new commandment, the commandment ‘love one another as I have loved you.’ That is to be the rule for the community of Jesus, the rule for the Church. That is our rule. And Jesus has just demonstrated the meaning of that by his treatment of Judas. A moment earlier, Judas had been singled out for special treatment. He had been given by Jesus the morsel from the common dish which was a sign of special love. The love of Jesus even encompasses the one who betrays him. Indeed the love of Jesus singles out the one who betrays him. That is the love which redeems the world. That is the love through which God is bringing about a new heaven and a new earth. That is the love which reveals the glory of God. At the moment of his betrayal, the stage was set for the ultimate disclosure of that love on the Cross – the Cross which is vindicated by the mystery of Easter. That is the love which is redeeming the world, a love which embraces each one of us even at those moments when we betray our Lord. That is the love which can never be defeated. That is the love on which, even at the darkest moments of the life of Christ’s Body the Church, our true hope is founded.
 
The secular world loves to condemn the sinner from a place of assumed righteousness. God, who alone is righteous, does not do that. We are not called to do that. This month especially we are invited to place ourselves with Judas, in a place where we have all been; in a place to which, in all likelihood, we all in one way or another will go again – the place of betrayal of our Lord. We are invited to place ourselves with Judas in the solidarity of the Body of Christ, and to open ourselves to the mystery of the love of our Lord who feeds us today and every day with that special sign of his love; to open ourselves to our Lord who shares with us his Body and Blood.
 
In this present dark night of the Church, we are to pray for healing, for forgiveness and for renewal. And we are invited especially to do that before that continuing sign of our glorified Lord’s real presence with us; that continuing sign of his dying and yet undying love for us, the sacrament of his Body given for us, his Blood shed that sins may be forgiven.
  

EASTER SUNDAY 2010

  Today’s Gospel begins with what looks like another disaster on top of the horror of the Cross. The body of Jesus, so carefully and reverently buried, has apparently been stolen. That is just the same explanation of the empty tomb as we hear of in St Matthew’s Gospel – except that there the guards are bribed to say it was the disciples of Jesus who did it. But in this account, Mary of Magdala runs to the disciples to tell them the news, and then we have that wonderful race between Peter and John. John is faster on his feet than Peter, but pauses at the entrance to the tomb. Peter catches up and blunders straight in – just as Peter so often does elsewhere in the Gospels. John eventually goes quietly in too. He sees the grave-clothes as Peter had done. But, we hear, ‘he saw and he believed’. He saw beyond the empty tomb. He realised that this wasn’t just a case of the theft of a body. He realised that the empty tomb was in fact evidence of an act of God. The empty tomb was not the end of the story; it was more like its beginning.
 
In the coming weeks we will be hearing St John’s account of meetings with the risen Christ. As in the other Gospels, these accounts are mysterious. In an obvious sense they don’t add up. ‘We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection’ declares Peter in the First Reading today. It sounds so matter-of-fact. And then at other times Jesus appears and disappears; he isn’t recognised, and then he is… It is all utterly mysterious. It is mysterious, but is it surprising? These baffling stories seem to me to point much more effectively to the mysterious reality than some tidy little account where everything fitted neatly. It is quite easy to believe that John Brown’s body lies a mould’ring in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. But that is not what is claimed for Jesus.  The empty tomb, the eating and drinking – that is saying something much more radical. It is saying that the total body-and-soul reality of Jesus has broken through the barrier of death. The total body-and-soul reality of Jesus has not been defeated by the assaults of men in the grip of evil. Borrowing a picture from the Psalms, St Paul in the Second Reading asserts that the total body-and-soul reality of Jesus is now ‘seated at God’s right hand’. In Jesus, God’s original plan for humanity has been fulfilled. Or at least it has begun to be fulfilled. As St Paul says elsewhere, ‘Christ the first-fruits; afterwards those who belong to Christ..’.
 
Those of us who took part in the Easter Vigil service last night heard again the story of humanity created in the image of God; humanity created for communion with God; humanity created to care for the natural world in a way which was in harmony with the intentions of the Creator. That something has gone seriously wrong is obvious. What we celebrate at Easter is not just the possibility that death is not the end, but much more the restoration in the risen Christ of humanity’s communion with God. We celebrate the beginning of the new creation; the beginning of the re-creation of the world.
 
That second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Colossians can sound terribly escapist. ‘Let your thoughts be on heaven, where Christ is, not on the things that are on the earth; after all, your life is now hidden with Christ in God.’ It can sound like a cosy little religious cocoon, in which we are insulated from the harsh realities of the secular world. But if you read on a bit, you realise that there is nothing escapist about it. In fact is precisely about engaging with the realities of the secular world, and particularly with those realities as I find them within myself. If through Baptism and Eucharist we are united to the risen Christ – the Christ whose whole being is communion with God; if that is the hidden truth about us – the hidden truth, but the deepest truth; if through Baptism and Eucharist we are united to the risen Christ, then we are bound to do battle with everything in us which contradicts that deepest truth and reality. If we take the resurrection of Jesus seriously, and our union with the risen Jesus, then we have a real fight on our hands.  Immediately following on from today’s reading St Paul has two of his lists of behaviours which are contrary to Christ. They are conventional lists perhaps, but not irrelevant to our day or our culture. One item is  ‘greed, graspingness, which is a form of idolatry’. That seems to pop up pretty regularly these days, as do some of the others. But behind the specifics, there is the challenge to the old ways – the challenge of Christ’s new creation.
 
‘If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is.’ In effect, this injunction is as radical and as challenging as Jesus’ call in the Sermon on the Mount to be ‘perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ And in practice it is very hard to take this sort of challenge wholly seriously. Because we simply know that we can’t do it. We can admire it from afar as an aspiration, but that is as far as it goes.
In the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew’s Gospel, we encounter Jesus as a great teacher and as an example. Many people surely only see him like that. Many people may admire the man, but imagine that his death on the Cross was the end of the story, if not the end of his influence. And even if I am a person of faith, it is not difficult to slip into this kind of attitude to Jesus. I keep these inspiring ideals somewhere at the back of my mind, and pay lip-service to them, but meanwhile life has to be lived in the real world; my thoughts inevitably have to be on ‘things that are on the earth’, and I deal with many of them without any reference to my status as Christian.
 
But here, surely, is the new element which is precisely a fruit of the resurrection of Jesus. Our relationship with him is not that of pupil to teacher, or simply aspiring disciple to admired holy man. We are not people struggling and generally failing to live up to some splendid ideal. Rather, the power for the renewal of the world as a whole, and specifically and immediately the power for my renewal, my re-creation – that power has its origin in God. It comes to me from the one who has been raised from the dead and sits at God’s right hand. It comes from the one whose tomb was found to be empty. It comes from the one who has taken our humanity in its totality back into communion with God. St Paul says to us ‘You have died, and now the life you have is hidden with God.’ That death was your baptism. The deepest reality of your present life – although a hidden reality – the deepest reality of your present life as a Christian, as a member of the Body of Christ – is the grace of God. Whatever I may be facing from day to day on the earth, I am to face it in conscious openness to that life which flows into me through my being in Christ; in Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, victorious. We are about to renew our baptismal promises. As I renew in a few moments the promises of renunciation of evil and commitment in faith to God, may I renew them in full reliance not on myself, but on the grace which comes to me through communion with God; communion with the Father through union with Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

HOLY THURSDAY 2010

At Calvary, the place of the Skull, the place of the crucifixion of Jesus, there were, we are told, three crosses. Jesus was crucified between two criminals. For us, the figure of Jesus clearly stands out. We have no difficulty in identifying him, even if we can’t always tell ‘the good thief’ apart from the other who railed against Jesus. But would it have been so at the time? Would the bloodied and battered figure of Jesus have been so very distinguishable from the two other convicts crucified with him? It looks as if he had attracted rather more attention than the other two in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. But, apart from that, he would have seemed to be just another common criminal. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus said ‘we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’. At one time or another quite a number had shared that hope. But, for most at least, crucifixion would have dashed that hope. Whatever the life of Jesus seemed to mean, this cruel death had put an end to it, as surely as it had put an end to the other two criminals. What could such a punishment, what could such a death possibly mean, except another small and shabby triumph for worldly cynicism and worldly power?
 
I am, of course, leaping ahead to Good Friday. Today we are not celebrating the crucifixion. Today we are celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. We are celebrating the Institution of the Eucharist. We are celebrating that amazing gesture of humble love when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Yes, we are. But it is important to remember that this ‘Triduum’ – the liturgical celebrations of these three days embracing tonight, the Liturgy of the Passion tomorrow, and the Vigil and Mass on Saturday evening – this is all a single celebration. It is a single celebration of what we call ‘the Paschal mystery’, the Passover mystery.
 
Passover is in fact the key word which links all three celebrations. The First Reading we heard this evening was the account in the Book of Exodus of the origins of the Jewish Passover meal. And according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Supper which we commemorate this evening was indeed a Passover meal. The Christian Eucharist was built by Jesus on the foundation of the Jewish Passover meal. But our Gospel this evening comes from St John, and he gives us a different slant. He is clearly describing the same supper, although his teaching about the Eucharist is to be found elsewhere in the Gospel. But he says very clearly at the beginning, ‘It was before the feast of the Passover’. And he does that because for St John, the Passover - the real one, the one which has superseded all previous Passovers – the true Passover is when Jesus the true Lamb of God is sacrificed. The true Passover happens not today but tomorrow.
 
Who is right? Scholars have argued about that, but it is really irrelevant. The truth is, both are right. Holy Thursday and the Christian Passover meal would not make sense without Good Friday. And Good Friday would be meaningless without Holy Thursday. What Jesus does at the Last Supper is to show the meaning – to show what is at the heart of his terrible and apparently meaningless suffering and death. To most outside observers, his death may have been virtually indistinguishable from that of the other two convicts on either side of him. But the deeper reality is that it could not have been more different.
 
At the Last Supper Jesus gives the meaning of his death. ‘While they were at supper, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you”. On the following day, Jesus will be a helpless prisoner. But, as he says elsewhere, ‘No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of myself’. He gives up his body, and his whole being, into the hands of his Father. This journey to the cross and beyond is a journey of totally obedient love – love of the Father whose very nature is Love, and who can therefore be absolutely trusted. This journey through the cross is a true sacrifice – a sacrifice of obedient love. He gives up his body to his torturers. In response to the worst they can do, his prayer is, ‘Father, forgive them’. And he gives up his body for us, on our behalf. This outwardly meaningless death makes visible the love and the forgiveness of God, a love and forgiveness extended by God to alienated humanity, and extended for all time and for every place.
 
So, ‘Take this, all of you, and eat it.’ The body of Jesus is where the reconciliation of God and humanity takes place. The achievement of that reconciliation is on the cross. It is an achievement which only Jesus, only God in Jesus, could bring about. But even before it took place, Jesus wished to link his disciples to that moment, and to himself in that moment. ‘Take this and eat it, this is my body.’ As he might say, ‘I go on this journey alone, as I must. And yet I take you with me.’
 
But there is more. ‘Do this in memory of me’. ‘Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming the Lord’s death.’ At the supper, Jesus gave the meaning of his death and linked his disciples to himself in it. But it is clear that they did not really understand at the time. The meaning only became clear after his resurrection. What had been done by Jesus at the Last Supper was to be repeated. It was to be repeated through the centuries and throughout the world. It was and is the means through which we are united today to our living and glorious Lord Jesus, and to the great victory of God’s love which was achieved on that Friday – a victory for every time and every place.
 
Jesus is the true Passover Lamb. For the People of Israel, the people of the Old Covenant, the blood of the Passover Lamb signified an ancient deliverance from death, and the passing over from slavery to freedom. The blood of Jesus, shed on the cross, is the blood of the New Covenant. On the cross, by that one true sacrifice of obedient love, Jesus has opened a way of reconciliation with God for all people. In the humanity of Jesus, humanity has defeated the sin and evil which bring death, the sin and evil which separate us from God. Through the passing over of Jesus from death to life – through his death and resurrection – Jesus has opened up for humanity a road from slavery to our selfish desires, a road from slavery to the true freedom of the children of God. Jesus is the true Passover Lamb. This is our Passover Feast. In it, as in every Mass, the heart of the Good News of Jesus Christ is made present, as we gather as a priestly people in the presence of our risen Lord, to be united with him in his saving death, and to be fed with his risen life. Only thus united with him can we dare to hear those two new commandments, ‘Love one another as I have loved you’, and ‘Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News’.   

5th SUNDAY of LENT, Year C (2010)

That Gospel surely contains one of the most powerful, mysterious and deeply touching stories of Jesus that we possess. It is a story, initially, of Jesus in conflict with the scribes and the Pharisees – the experts on the Jewish law, and the most zealous upholders of that law. That in itself is a common enough Gospel theme. For the scribes and Pharisees, the woman at the centre of the story is considered simply as an object. She is an object drafted in to make a point and to present Jesus with a challenge. By the end, as she stands there alone in the presence of Jesus, she is no longer just an anonymous object. She has, in the presence of Jesus, become a person. A person, too, who has been given back her proper dignity. A person who has been recognised as such in the full reality and truth about her; a person who has been accepted as she is; a person who has received forgiveness, but who has also been challenged. ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more.’
 
You could see this story as a simple one of law versus love. Law is cold, impersonal, unfeeling. Here that cold, impersonal law is trumped by the warmth and humanity of love. There is something in that, but to take it simply like that would, I think, be to ignore the wider tradition. It would be to ignore the teaching of Jesus himself about the law. Jesus after all also said, ‘I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it.’ The law makes clear that there are real and absolute standards of right and wrong. Jesus himself also gives us a parable of judgement, the story of the separation of the sheep and the goats. So this Gospel cannot be seen as a sentimental blurring of these boundaries. The boundaries stand. Indeed this is clear from the challenge to the woman which Jesus himself issues: ‘Go and don’t sin any more.’  If Jesus does not condemn the woman, it is certainly not because for Jesus ‘anything goes’. It is certainly not because for Jesus the supreme value is tolerance.
 
So the law stands. The Ten Commandments, which are still an important basic outline of Christian morality, have not been superseded by some vague criterion of conduct based simply on feeling. Yet in the Second Reading St Paul also contrasts his attempt to live by the law with his discovery of a way of life based on love; a way of life based on his relationship with Jesus Christ. ‘I am no longer trying for perfection by my own efforts, the perfection that comes from the Law, but I want only the perfection that comes through faith in Christ…’. It may seem almost strange, but there is a parallel between the experience of St Paul – the experience indeed of his dramatic conversion –  and the encounter of the woman with Jesus in the Gospel. And her encounter too must also have been an experience of conversion. In St Paul’s case, it wasn’t that the Law of God in itself was bad. It was simply that St Paul made two discoveries. On the one hand, he found that he couldn’t keep the Law in its fullness by his own efforts. On the other hand, he also discovered that there was more to life than keeping the Law. The Law has an important place as a basic framework, but it needs to be animated by love. For those who are seeking fullness of life, that search will only find its fulfilment in a personal encounter. From the moment of St Paul’s conversion, everything else seemed like rubbish compared with his relationship with Jesus Christ. From the moment of her encounter with Jesus, the woman in the Gospel ceased to be simply an object and became a person.
 
In both cases, in the Gospel and in the Second Reading, there is a movement from law to love. And that seems to me to link with a theme which runs through all the readings this Sunday, and is stated clearly in the First Reading. ‘No need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before. See, I am doing a new deed.’ We don’t of course know what the prophet Isaiah had in mind exactly. But as I read that, it surely speaks of God’s new deed in Jesus Christ – Jesus Christ the beginning of God’s new creation.
 
‘No need to recall the past’ says Isaiah. The past he has just recalled is the crossing of the Red Sea. The People of God brought safely through the waters; the Egyptians snuffed out like a wick. The People who were entrusted with God’s Law were saved. But they were saved at the cost of the destruction of the Egyptians. So didn’t God care about the Egyptians? It is surely a fair question. And the pattern is frequently repeated in the Old Testament. God’s People are kept safe, but at the cost of destroying all those who do not share their world-view. It is, you could say, Taliban tactics. You keep the people on the straight and narrow (as far as you can see it) by simply destroying those who deviate. Those who commit adultery must be stoned to death. The Law must be enforced. God’s standards must be upheld – at any cost. Right and wrong really matter.

3rd SUNDAY OF LENT, Year C

In the Gospel, Jesus is faced with the latest horror-story in the news, the latest example of Roman brutality. Instead of expressing sympathy, he reminds people of another nasty accident, the tower of Siloam which fell and crushed eighteen people. And he raises that perennial question, ‘Why did it happen?’ ‘Why did it happen to these particular people? ‘What had the victims done to deserve this?’ It is an unanswerable question, and in the Gospel Jesus does not answer it. Instead, in the face of the risk and uncertainty of life, he issues a challenge. ‘Repent!’ Indeed he says ‘Repent, or you will perish!’
 
On the face of it, this seems to reflect a picture of God who delights in condemnation. But the second part of the Gospel modifies the picture. The parable of the fig tree sets the patience and compassion of God alongside the demand for fruitfulness. ‘Leave it one more year; dig round and put on manure; give it another chance.’ This is reflected in the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, the liturgy for the imposition of the ashes at the very beginning of Lent: ‘Direct our hearts to better things, O Lord; heal our sin and ignorance. Lord, do not face us suddenly with death, but give us time to repent.’
 
At the heart of Lent is the call to repentance. Very often, I suspect, when I am called to repent, it isn’t easy to see exactly what that might involve. I may have a general sense of unease, a general sense that I could be a lot better. But it is difficult to see what repentance might really entail. If that reflects your experience at all, today’s readings, taken as a whole, might suggest a rather different way of looking at it. Not only the Gospel, with its emphasis on the patience and the compassion of God – the God who doesn’t just want to throw away the unfruitful tree - but also the first two readings.
 
The first is that strange and wonderful story of Moses and the burning bush. Moses is going about his ordinary business, looking after his father-in-law’s sheep. He isn’t particularly thinking about God, but he is struck by this strange phenomenon of the bush. I’ve heard a suggestion that there is a natural explanation for the phenomenon he encountered. I don’t know whether such an explanation is true, but the burning bush doesn’t have to be a miracle. Many of you will have had at some time experiences of the world of nature which have spoken strongly to you of the mystery and wonder of God. Through that strange phenomenon, Moses became aware of the nearness but also the holiness of God. He knew he had to remove his shoes. It may seem a strange gesture, but I think it isn’t only Muslims who remove their shoes to pray. The great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a marvellous poem which begins ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’. The world is charged with the grandeur of God, but most of the time we don’t notice. We are insensitive to it. Hopkins expresses this by saying ‘neither can foot feel, being shod’. Bare feet are sensitive to the earth; sensitive in a way that feet in boots are not.
 
Moses hears the call of God, ‘Take off your shoes, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ The ground was in fact a very ordinary piece of desert, but Moses recognised it was holy ground – it was the place of the presence of God. Another context in which I have found those words come to life is when I have been working with people on a one-to-one basis in retreat, or on parish weeks of accompanied prayer. Anyone who has listened to another person struggling to articulate the experience of God in their lives – often the longing for God who seems to be absent, as well as the peace and joy that comes with a sense of God’s presence –  also knows what it is to stand on holy ground. That is perhaps an obvious context. But I would be surprised if there is anyone here who could not find some such moment – a moment in relation to another person or to the world of nature – in which they experienced something of this sense of reverence; something of this need for stillness before the mystery and holiness of God.
 
Such moments may be rare, but they point to something which is true in every moment. Every time, every place, every encounter is in fact a standing on holy ground. As Hopkins wrote, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’. My daily attempts at prayer have the object of deliberately seeking to be open to that truth and that reality. It might be really helpful to think what I am doing when I come to pray as  ‘taking off my shoes’. What I am seeking to do when I come to a time of prayer is to  allow my feet, to allow myself, a degree of sensitivity which is not always available. Jesus says, ‘Repent!’, and that surely is repentance. To repent is at least to seek to be open to the presence and the mystery of God who is there behind every moment of my day and every circumstance of my life. Taking time to pray is about allowing the Holy Spirit of God to change my mind-set, so that I begin to see everything with a different perspective. It is about seeking to put on the mind of Christ; about opening myself to seeing the world with the eyes of Christ.
 
And that brings me to what St Paul has to say at the beginning of the Second Reading. Moses was all alone in the desert. I have been speaking about glimpses of the mystery of God which we experience as individuals, and which are deeply personal, and in a sense private. But St Paul takes us into the communal. He begins by speaking of that mysterious journey of the People of God under the leadership of Moses – that forty-years journey through the Red Sea and across the desert to the Promised Land.  The season of Lent reflects that journey. In this season we become particularly aware that we are not just isolated individuals, but the People of God on a journey. It is a wandering journey, and a desert journey, but a journey towards a promised goal which is truly wonderful and utterly fulfilling, a journey towards the Kingdom of God; a journey towards the fullest possible sharing in the community of God’s love.
 
St Paul speaks about Moses and events long past. But he is also clearly speaking to the Church in Corinth about their life in the present. They are on this journey; they are part of this same People of God. And so are we. St Paul is equally clearly speaking about our life as Church now. We too now drink from the spiritual rock which follows us, and that rock is Christ. We too have been baptised into that cloud and that sea; we too eat the same spiritual food and drink the same spiritual drink – exactly the same, indeed, as the Church in Corinth. We are a community caught up as a community in the mystery, the cloud, of God’s glory revealed in Christ; we are a community defined by our baptism into the Body of Christ; we are a community constantly rooted back into the mystery of his death and resurrection, and fed with his life, through the Eucharist. If the call to repent is a call to us as individuals to put on the mind of Christ as our fundamental mind-set, it is also a call to rediscover our fundamental identity as part of this pilgrim people, our fundamental identity as members of the Body of Christ.
 
‘Unless you repent, you will perish.’ To repent is to focus unequivocally on the way that leads to life. It means to seek to discover the holy ground on which my true identity as an individual rests. It means to recognise that that identity can only ultimately be found within that community which is founded on the rock of Christ; that community which is nourished by his Body and Blood; that community which is on a journey to his Kingdom.    
 
  

6th SUNDAY of YEAR ‘C’ (2010)

Once, according to the old Code of Canon Law, it was expressly forbidden for Catholic priests to go to the theatre. Happily this is no longer the case. However a very dedicated and hard-working Anglican priest of my acquaintance had rather different ideas. He used to exclaim, ‘Hooray! It’s Lent! Now I can go to the theatre!’
 
Lent will be upon us again next Wednesday, but I am not necessarily recommending that as an ideal Lenten discipline. However, for the clergyman in question, I am sure that it was a good one. He was not just being frivolous. He was by temperament a workaholic. To go to the theatre, to enjoy some humanly enriching aspect of the arts – this was for him a way of ‘thrusting his roots into the stream’. It was a way of deliberately getting off the endless superficial travelator of activity and opening himself up to some of the deeper and richer aspects of God-given humanity.
 
So Lent isn’t only about ‘giving up’. But ‘giving up’ remains important.This Lent, CAFOD is putting before us in a more extended way the traditional Lenten practice of ‘giving up’. It is encouraging us to use our Lent to turn biscuits into bicycles, and indeed wine into water. St Luke sets before us very starkly this week the contrast between rich and poor; and when it comes to that contrast in our world as a whole, there is no doubt which side most of us are on. Fasting as giving up, and almsgiving as sharing with the poor of the world - these are important aspects of our traditional Lenten disciplines.
 
However what really struck me this year as I reflected on this Sunday’s readings was Jeremiah’s tree planted by the waterside, that tree which reappears also in the Psalm response to the Jeremiah reading. The third traditional element of our Lenten discipline is prayer. And what a wonderful image that tree is of what prayer is centrally about. As you consider what disciplines you might undertake for Lent, what about looking at what thrusting your roots into the stream might mean for you? How it might be done?
 
Any of the three Lent Courses mentioned in the newsletter might be a help with this. And the newsletter also has a reminder of the ‘My Day by Day’ booklets, containing some of the Church’s  daily Mass readings in handy form. The ‘happy man’ in today’s psalm finds his happiness based on ‘pondering the law of God day and night.’ That may be literally impossible, but (if we don’t do so already) it might point us to taking a brief time and place each day to ponder some part of those scriptures in a way which is not just ‘thinking about them’, but pondering them in the light of the Holy Spirit; pondering them in a spirit of expectancy; pondering them as one open to the possibility that through them God will make me aware of his Presence; that through them God will speak to me.
 
How does God speak to me in prayer? That is a complex question. Occasionally a word or a verse of scripture does speak so directly to my heart that I hear it as a word of God to me personally. But most of the time, I think, it is more like making myself deliberately and consciously aware of my life, and of the world about me, as being held within the creative purpose of God, the God who is love. The Scripture, as I ponder it, makes me aware of some aspect of that all-pervading love.
 
One of the features which struck me immediately about the Gospel and the Second reading today was that they seem to focus not on the present, but on future blessedness. St Paul is speaking of the resurrection of Christ. In the light of that, he says ‘If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people.’ And in the Gospel Jesus appears to base the blessedness of the poor and hungry not on the present, but on the ultimate reversal of roles. The rich will be sent empty away; the poor and hungry will be satisfied. 
 
That reversal of roles is, certainly, part of the truth. But I don’t think the message to us this coming Lent is that we should make ourselves as miserable as possible for the next six weeks in the hope of adding to our future blessedness. The real contrast in the Gospel between the rich and the poor is different. The real contrast is in the fact that the rich are having their consolation now. The danger of too much trust in material well-being; the danger of total emphasis on my activities within this life, is that this becomes the boundary of my vision. I can no longer see anything beyond it, anything deeper than it.
 
In St Luke’s Gospel, which we are reading this year, Jesus says quite simply ‘How happy, how blessed, are you who are poor; yours is the kingdom of God.’ He speaks of poverty without any qualification. In St Matthew’s Gospel it is the ‘poor in spirit’ who are called happy or blessed. It can look a bit as if St Matthew is spiritualising the teaching of Jesus; escaping from St Luke’s stark contrast between rich and poor. But if there is a blessing in poverty, it is the blessing of knowing oneself to be in need; knowing oneself not to be entirely self-sufficient. I do not think it is stretching things too far to say that ‘the poor’ in this context are those who ‘know their need of God.’
 
So the ‘pondering prayer’ to which these scriptures call us is a deliberate pondering of the larger, deeper context in which the events of every day are set. An allowing of our roots to reach down into that deep spring of God’s creative love which is at the heart of everything that is. Allowing our roots to reach down into the creative mystery of the spring of resurrection Life - life out of death, joy out of tragedy – that spring of resurrection Life in Christ which enables us to believe and to hope even in the face of apparent darkness; even in the face of the seeming triumph of evil.
 
‘How happy are you poor: yours is the kingdom of heaven.’ One could do worse than to take that simple phrase as a starting point for the sort of daily prayer that Ignatius of Loyola thought was more important than any other – the daily review of the day. In need only take five or ten minutes. I need to find a place of stillness. I need to ask for the light of God’s Holy Spirit – to see, as it were, with God’s eyes, not mine. And, open to that light, I let my memory range over the past day. What have been the gifts, however small, to be thankful for? A ray of sunshine? A smile in the street? What during the day has moved me in the direction of God and God’s Kingdom? Opened me up to God’s Kingdom? And where have I been closed to that invitation? Where have I resisted it? Have I deliberately turned the other way? Through such prayerful reflection God speaks. God speaks, and I respond – with gratitude, with sorrow, with an appeal for the help of God’s grace. Above all with faith and trust.
 
‘A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord, with the Lord for his hope. He is like a tree by the waterside that thrusts its roots to the stream…it has no worries in a year of drought, and never ceases to bear fruit.’
   

3rd SUNDAY of YEAR C (2010)

 What has been in the background of our living during the past week, and probably in the foreground of all our praying? It must surely have been for most of us the victims of the earthquake in Haiti; the frustrations of the rescuers and aid workers; the sheer unimaginable scale of the whole disaster. I have been receiving a number of emails from Bishop Crispian which have been bringing it closer to home; the de Montfort Missionaries who used to be in Andover and Romsey have lost brothers and sisters; so have the Wisdom Sisters in Romsey. A harrowing series of photographs forwarded by a priest of our diocese showed the joyful celebration only last December of the opening of a new school in Port-au-Prince by the Redemptorists. The last photographs showed a heap of rubble, a shattered crucifix, the feet of a dead child, a grieving relative. It seems that practically the whole staff, the priests and nearly all the children have been killed. It is wonderful that we managed as a parish to raise such a large sum in a spontaneous collection last weekend towards CAFOD’s relief effort. But I’m sure we all feel that the money, useful as it will be, hardly goes to the heart of the matter.  There is a kind of numbness in the face of a disaster too great to take in.
 
A somewhat comparable event was the Lisbon earthquake which happened early in the morning one day in 1755, and may have killed as many as 100,000 people. It was an event which at that time made many  question the providence of God, even the existence of God. On the News the other day, a young girl, rescued from the ruins of Port-au-Prince, was heard to murmur ‘Dieu merci’. ‘Thank God’, she was alive. And her faith, it seems, had survived; as, wonderfully, has the faith of many others who have lost family, friends, everything. For it may not be very logical, but we surely do experience such disasters as a challenge to faith.
 
We know that the God in whom we believe, although the Creator of all, does not adjust the natural workings of his creation in order to eliminate such disasters. But if the Haiti earthquake has prompted you to question God, at one level I don’t see how it could not have done so. It is true that if such a massive disaster poses that question, so should a vast number of much smaller disasters – disasters which may not have touched us, but have been just as agonising for the individuals involved.
 
Faith may be a gift of God, but that does not mean that it sails along untroubled by questions and doubts, however long and firmly that faith has taken possession of my soul. Indeed the Catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary doubt. It is one thing deliberately to reject what God has revealed. It is quite another to be wrestling with the sort of questions which are thrown up by this disaster, or by all sorts of happenings, views and arguments with which we are confronted from day to day. To wrestle prayerfully with these doubts cannot be sinful, and indeed must be a necessary process in the deepening and maturing of faith.
 
If a massive natural disaster is the present background to our lives, part of the Scriptural background to this Mass is an extraordinary passage from Nehemiah. It describes the solemn reading of key passages of what we would now call ‘the Old Testament’ to the assembled inhabitants of Jerusalem, both young and old. The context is the return from exile, and the re-establishment of the practice of the faith of Israel in that city. Those assembled to listen were partly returning exiles. But there will also have been those who had remained, but who had lost touch with the tradition of the living God -  the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, the God of the prophet Isaiah, whose words Jesus himself proclaims in the Gospel.  The faith of these people had been eroded not by the challenge of a sudden catastrophe, but by the slow process of neglect – probably a more powerful engine of doubt in our own time even than movings of the earth. And they assembled to hear again the proclamation of the Law of God.
 
‘The Law’ in this context is not simply the Ten Commandments, the rules to be obeyed if human life is to flourish. The Law in this context is the whole history of God’s revelation of himself in the history of the people – centrally, no doubt, the story of deliverance from slavery in Egypt, wilderness wandering, establishment in the Promised Land. What this congregation came together to hear was the story of God’s faithfulness and of God’s promises. And what they heard moved them deeply. It moved them deeply, and it moved them to repentance. Through the proclamation of the word, the truth and reality of God came alive for them once more. They may have been a relatively small and beleaguered religious group, but they now saw themselves anew within the context of the living God who had always cared for them, sought them, had great purposes for them. It was in this light that Nehemiah the Governor and Ezra the priest told the people not just to bewail their past faithlessness, but to rejoice. ‘Do not be sad: the joy of the Lord is your stronghold’.
 
That solemn reading of the Scripture recorded in the Book of Nehemiah is mirrored each week in the celebration of Mass. It doesn’t go on from early morning until noon; it doesn’t encompass the whole story of God’s creating and redeeming work, but only some part of it each week. But as we come to Mass. bringing with us the battering which our faith may have had during the week, we are placed back within the whole story of God’s love, the whole story of his purpose from the beginning of creation until the end of time. And for us it is much better, for we know more of the story. For we have not only the Old Testament but also the Gospel.
 
This year the Gospel comes to us through St Luke. And we have heard today his introduction to the whole work. ‘After carefully going over the whole story from the beginning, I have decided to write an ordered account, so that you may learn how well-founded is the teaching you have received.’ It is clear from the opening words of the Gospel that St Luke sees the events he is recording as a fulfilment; a fulfilment of all that has gone before; a fulfilment of all that was proclaimed from that wooden platform in Jerusalem. And indeed today we leap from the introductory paragraph of the Gospel straight to the first public appearance of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth. The intervening chapters are read on other occasions during the year. We leap to the point at which Jesus proclaims himself to be the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah. ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me…to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.’ In the immediate context it is poignant that the word for ‘downtrodden’ actually means ‘shattered’ or ‘splintered’. The Lord’s promise embraces all those shattered bodies imprisoned in the rubble of Haiti.
 
But if amid our questioning in the face of so much suffering we can hold on to the promise of the Lord’s year of favour; if in the midst of sadness of this tragedy we can hear those words ‘the joy of the Lord is your stronghold’; if we can at this time hold on to hope and even to joy, it can only be because of one thing. It can only be because of the central reality into which we are bound through the Mass – the reality of the Body of Christ; the reality of the God who in Christ has suffered with us and for us; the reality of the Body of Christ wounded, dead and buried; the reality of the Body of Christ raised up through death in the power of the Spirit – raised up to the glory of the Father.  
 

THE BAPTISM of the LORD Yr C

When it comes to the celebration of the Epiphany each year, we get, in effect, three bites at the cherry. We generally think of Epiphany in connection with the Three Kings, and that is the story which is at the centre of the feast itself. But there are two other Gospel mysteries which are also recognised as ‘epiphanies’, that is, manifestations of Jesus as Christ and Lord. These are the Baptism of the Lord, which we celebrate today, and the Marriage Feast at Cana. Today’s feast is the last in the Christmas cycle. If I said (this year) that today is the last white Sunday, and that next Sunday we will be back to green, I might be misunderstood. I fear that, outside at least, next Sunday the ground may still be white. But the vestments will be green. However the Gospel will be the marriage feast at Cana. This year we are in the third cycle of Sunday readings. In this year alone do we get all three ‘epiphany’ Gospels, one by one, on Sundays. In the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church – the Daily Office – these three epiphany mysteries are interwoven  throughout the Epiphany season, for they are all, in different ways, manifestations of Christ to the world.
 
This year we are normally reading St Luke’s Gospel on Sundays. Next week we dip into St John, because the marriage at Cana is only found in that Gospel. But today we have St Luke’s account of the Baptism of Jesus. We have read a good deal of St Luke’s Gospel over Christmas, too, because St Luke’s Gospel begins with all those lovely accounts of the birth and early years of Jesus. St Mark’s Gospel, in contrast, actually begins with the Baptism of Jesus. It begins at the point at which Jesus comes into public view. It begins with his ‘manifestation’, his epiphany.
 
But there is, of course, much more to the Baptism of Jesus than simply the fact that it marks the starting-point of his public ministry. It is, certainly, extremely important that Jesus didn’t simply decide on his own that the moment had come to begin his preaching, teaching and healing ministry. In his Baptism, he is commissioned for that ministry by his Father. The whole of his public ministry, and indeed his Passion, death and resurrection, need to be seen within the frame provided by the Baptism. All that Jesus does he does as the beloved Son of the Father; all that Jesus does, he does within the relationship with the Father which his Baptism displays almost as a visual icon.
 
So what is the particular ‘epiphany’ which celebrate today? Last Sunday’s epiphany was fairly obvious. It was about the manifestation of Jesus as Lord and King of all the nations of the earth. To this centre were drawn the three mysterious figures who represent both the nations of the world and also the wisdom of the world. Of all of this, Jesus was manifested as Lord. Last Sunday’s epiphany foreshadowed that command of Jesus at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’.
 
The Lord’s command was to baptise, and here we are celebrating not our baptism, but his. Obviously, the baptism of Jesus by John was not a baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity. Indeed in the Gospel John the Baptist specifically distinguishes his ‘baptism with water’ from the baptism offered by Jesus, which will be a ‘baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire’. John, we are told, was reluctant to baptise Jesus, because he didn’t need that purification from sin which John’s baptism signified. Jesus told him to continue, because Jesus did need to be totally identified with sinful humanity, even if not himself sinful. John’s baptism was not baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity. However, the scene which today’s Gospel describes we can now see as itself an icon of the Holy Trinity. It depicts the perfect relationship of love between the Father and the Son, united in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is attentive to the Father in prayer; the voice of the Father is heard; the Holy Spirit from the Father descends on the Son. Here is depicted that relationship of love which is the very heart of the mystery of God, that relationship and that mystery into which we are drawn through our baptism.
   
So you could say that these two ‘epiphany’ mysteries – the mystery of the manifestation of Jesus to the nations and mystery of his baptism – are complementary to each other. The one is about reaching out to embrace the whole human race. The other is about drawing the whole human race in; drawing the whole human race in to share in the mystery of the Holy Trinity; drawing the whole human race up into the mystery of God’s love for which God created us in the first place.
 
In the Daily Prayer of the Church, in the Office of Readings for one of the weekdays of the Epiphany season, there is an interesting passage from the writings of St Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria in 412. St Cyril was an influential theologian who, incidentally, had much to do with the acceptance by the Church of the title ‘Mother of God’ for Our Lady, that title which is now so familiar to us all. St Cyril wonders why it is necessary for Jesus to receive the Holy Spirit at his baptism, when as the Son of God he was already united to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit from all eternity. And he comes to the conclusion that he receives the Holy Spirit for us. He receives the Holy Spirit as the first-fruit and representative of our humanity. In Jesus our humanity is re-created and made new by the action of the Holy Spirit.
 
In today’s Gospel, St John the Baptist draws the distinction between his own baptism and the baptism with which Jesus will baptise. Jesus will baptise ‘with the Holy Spirit and with fire’. Those words naturally remind us of the events of Pentecost. Then, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the gathered Church in the form of the wind of the Spirit, and of tongues of fire.
 
The ultimate purpose of the epiphany of Jesus – Jesus beloved Son of the Father, Jesus Christ and Lord – is to share with us the Holy Spirit; that Holy Spirit who is the breath of true and eternal life; that Holy Spirit whose essence is the fire of love; that Holy Spirit whose heart is love, but whose fire of love is a fire which also searches and purifies us in the service of love. The ultimate purpose of the epiphany of Jesus is to draw us - in union with Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit – into the life of God. The ultimate purpose of the epiphany of Jesus is to draw us into the life of the One God, Holy Trinity, to whom be all glory and praise for time and for eternity.
  
 

EPIPHANY 2010

During this week we will all be dismantling the Christmas trees and gathering up the Christmas cards. Traditionally, of course, this does not happen before ‘Twelfth Night’, the last of the twelve days of Christmas. And that twelfth day (6thJanuary) is, traditionally, the Feast of the Epiphany. Like Christmas Day itself, the Feast of the Epiphany is a Holy Day of Obligation. It is such an important feast day that all Catholics should come together on it to celebrate Mass. And that is why our Bishops have told us to celebrate it not on the twelfth day of Christmas but on the nearest Sunday – to make it easier for as many people as possible to be there. So you may be taking your tree down this evening, or there may be three more days before you have to sweep up the pine needles. But at some point you will be looking through those cards again. Despite the secularisation of Christmas, some of those cards will bear some relation to the birth of Jesus Christ. Of those, it would be interesting to notice how many depict some aspect of the Epiphany story. My guess is that it will be the greatest number.  Certainly the very first card I received this year was a picture of the three kings and their gifts.
 
It isn’t surprising that it is a story which has inspired poets and painters. And if you were listening attentively to the Gospel you will have noticed that St Matthew says nothing about kings, and doesn’t even say that there were three of them. There were three gifts, so we have assumed that there were three givers of gifts. And what the Gospel tells us is that they were ‘wise men’ – ‘magi’. That word links them to Persia, but it is also the word from which we derive our word ‘magic’. We only call them kings because of the First Reading and the Psalm. ‘The nations will come to your light, and kings to your dawning brightness.’ So says the prophet Isaiah. And the Psalmist sings ‘the kings of Tarshish and the sea coasts shall pay him tribute. The kings of Sheba and Seba shall bring him gifts. Before him all kings shall fall prostrate…’.
 
 ‘All kings shall fall prostrate.’ That is where the kings bring us back to the text of the Gospel. Because that is precisely what the wise men do when they encounter the Christ child. They fall prostrate before him. They worship. Our Gospel simply says ‘they did him homage.’ It all sounds rather quaint and feudal. The older versions use the word ‘worship’. And I expect the new versions for use at Mass, when we get them, will restore the word ‘worship’. Because that is what the Magi did; that is what the three Kings did, and that is what, at least in one aspect, this feast is really about. It is about worship.
 
The Feast of the Epiphany is about worship. So it isn’t just the end of the Christmas season, something that has to be cleared away so that we can get back to our ordinary day-to-day lives. The Epiphany is about something which should be a particular characteristic of all Christian people every day of their lives. And perhaps I should widen that to say a particular characteristic of all those who share our faith in God. An attitude of reverence and worship before the God who has made everything that is, and who holds everything in being. If you think about it for a moment, that must surely be a fundamental attitude of anyone who takes their faith in God seriously.
 
This doesn’t mean that we all keep being overcome by the need to prostrate ourselves before God as we go about our daily tasks. It doesn’t mean that we keep being overwhelmed by God’s goodness and majesty and love and mercy, so that we can’t get on with the shopping.  But it does mean that we try to see everything we do, and especially everyone we meet, in the light of the truth that they are creatures that in some way reflect the Creator. In the case of men and women, they not only reflect the Creator, but are made in the image of the Creator, however much that image may be at this moment spoiled or invisible.
 
There are moments, of course, when practically anyone, whatever their faith or lack of it, is drawn to worship. It may be on encountering some majestic or beautiful aspect of the natural world; it may be on hearing a piece of music, or contemplating a work of art. It may be through falling in love, or seeing someone deeply loved anew. But if we truly believe that not just on Sunday but from Monday to Saturday our world is God’s world; if we truly believe that behind all the goodness and glory of the world, and also somewhere behind all the darkness and the pain, there is God; if we truly believe that as far as we can penetrate the mystery of our existence, there lies behind it a Being both purposeful and personal whose nature is Love – if that is true, then we need quite deliberately to practice worship.
 
We need deliberately to cultivate an attitude of reverence before the world which is charged with the glory of God, and supremely an attitude of reverence and worship before the mystery of God himself. In part, at least, we come to Mass each Sunday, and we need to come to Mass each Sunday, simply to restore and to reinforce that fundamental vision of the world. We need to come to Mass in order once more to join the heavenly host in singing ‘Holy, holy, holy…’. And the point about the heavenly host is that they continue that song even when we have stopped singing it and have started thinking about dinner – which, with luck, is not until Mass is over.
 
The Feast of the Epiphany is about worship – worship as a fundamental attitude and response before the mystery of God. But the worship of the Magi, (the wise men, the three kings) was in a particular context. ‘Going into the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and fell down and worshipped him.’ In the Second Reading, St Paul tells us that ‘it was by revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery.’ Our faith in God is not based simply on that mystery dimly perceived through the wonders of the created universe. It is not even based on the disclosures of individual prophets gifted with particular insight into the nature of the mystery of God. Both these are precious. But they have been crowned by God’s revelation of himself in this Child – this Child to whom were presented those prophetic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  This Child who is not only the fullest disclosure possible of God in human terms, but also the one in whom our humanity is redeemed and renewed.
 
And so this Child is given three gifts. Gold because he will be revealed as Universal King; frankincense because he is the True Priest, who even here and now leads us in our worship of the Father; myrrh to remind us, once again, that it was through his sacrificial offering in love on the cross; it was through his death and embalming for burial, his death and burial crowned by his resurrection, that we are redeemed and renewed. And so here and now, as at every Mass, we are raised up with him in the power of the Holy Spirit as we share in his perfect offering of worship to the Father. ‘Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever. Amen.’    
 
 

CHRISTMAS DAY (2009)

When I was a child I used to wish that we could have coloured electric lights on our Christmas tree, as some of my friends did. It seemed much more exciting than candles. In time, of course, I came to see those candles rather differently. Indeed when I first had any responsibility for a Christmas tree myself, I remember scouring the shops to try to find those little metal clip-on holders for tree candles. They were already quite out of fashion and hard to come by. Now of course we have Health and Safety, so if I tried to use them now I would probably get arrested.
 
  But lights remain an important part of Christmas. Nowadays Christmas tree lights are only part of it. People string lights around the trees in their front gardens; some people even have animated scenes in lights all over the front of their houses. And some of them don’t seem to have much to do with Christmas – or at least not with Christmas as those of us who are here would understand it. But that probably shouldn’t worry us too much. When Pope Gregory the Great sent Saint Augustine to convert the English, he told him not to destroy their pagan festivals – just to turn them into Christian ones. It’s not a bad principle. I’m sure those who lived in Kennington before St Augustine got here - or in our case probably St Birinus a bit later on – were lighting bonfires and creating artificial lights in the depths of winter to try to charm the sun back again; or perhaps just to keep warm and cheer themselves up. And then along came St Birinus with a message very much like that of John the Baptist in that wonderful Gospel. ‘He was not that light, but only a witness to speak for the light. The Word was the true light that enlightens all humanity, and he was coming into the world.’
 
 John the Baptist was of course preparing the way for Jesus. His message was, ‘He’s coming’. St Birinus would have said, as we say too, ‘He’s here. He’s come’. ‘The Word of God who was with God in the beginning, the source of the life which is the true light of humanity, has come into the world.’ ‘The Word was made flesh, and lived among us.’ The grace of God, the love and the mercy and the generosity of God, have been revealed to us - to the fullest degree that they can be revealed or understood by human beings – they have been revealed to us in the person of Jesus, who took flesh, took bodily humanity, from the Virgin Mary his Mother. The grace of God has been revealed in Jesus, and the truth of God has been revealed in Jesus. If we want to know the truth about God, as far as human beings can understand it, then we need to look at Jesus. If we want to know the fundamental truth about what we are as human beings, what we are made for and what a good human life is – again, we need to look at Jesus. Since the time of Jesus there have of course been wonderful discoveries about human beings, advances in psychology and so on. These things have increased our knowledge, and enriched our understanding, but they have not surpassed, or made obsolete, the grace and truth that have come through Jesus Christ; the grace and the truth of the one who, as the Gospel says, ‘is nearest to the Father’s heart.’
 
   In the present climate of thought, we need to hold on to this with great faith and confidence. The Archbishop of Canterbury complained in a talk the other day that the present government treated Christians, and  indeed people of other faiths as well, as ‘oddballs’. The tendency is to be more dismissive of Christians than others, because they probably will not make a fuss. We need to stand up for our faith with confidence. Not because this was once a Christian country so we have a kind of right to speak which others don’t have; we need to stand up for our faith with confidence because it is true. We celebrate at Christmas the fact that
 ‘the true light that enlightens all people has come into the world’.
 
    So what about the others? Listen again to that splendid beginning to the Letter to the Hebrews: ‘ At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets.’ Clearly the writer was thinking of the way that the Old Testament prophets prepared the People of Israel for Jesus. But we don’t have to limit those words to the Old Testament prophets, or even to the time before Jesus. The prophet Mohamed lived six hundred years after Jesus. Yet it seems clear to me that he can be seen as preparing the way for Jesus the Word of God made flesh – preparing the way by drawing those who worshipped idols to faith in One God – exactly, you could say, what happens in the Old Testament. And I had a fascinating conversation the other day with a deeply religious Hindu. It was not hard to see the action of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who inspired the prophets, at work in him.  But also to see that all the truth he professed would be enriched, sometimes modified, but ultimately brought to fulfilment, by the Word that God has spoken through the Son, the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus.
 
    At the Annunciation, Mary simply said, ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord.’ She nurtured in her womb the One was was indeed ‘The Way, the Truth and the Life’; the one who was the true light of the world. It did not for one moment make her arrogant; rather the reverse. To be entrusted with God’s revelation of himself in Jesus, to come to faith in Jesus as the Son and Word of God, should draw us towards her humility. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. But that is quite different from the current cynicism about all truth; the general assumption that all religions are equally true, which often ends up by meaning that all are equally false.
 
   May we celebrate this Christmas in humble but confident faith. ‘In various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son.’ ‘The Word was made flesh and lived among us; we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.’  
 

CHRISTMAS MIDNIGHT MASS (2009)

For readings at Christmas, you couldn’t do better, it might seem, than the ones we read at the Mass of Midnight. The Gospel is the ‘classic’ Christmas story – manger, angels, shepherds, the lot. And for a First Reading we have that familiar prophecy of Isaiah. Parts of it, at least, almost immediately translate themselves into song. It may be Handel’s Messiah; it may be a familiar carol. But there is one bit which every year sticks in my throat. ‘All the footgear of battle, every cloak rolled in blood, is burnt, and consumed by fire.’ It just seems to strike a wrong note. And it would be so easy to cut it out, without spoiling the flow of the passage, or the sense. But there it is, and usually I mentally rush over it. I want to get on to the best bit: ‘For there is a child born for us, a son given to us…’. That is what in the end it is all about. Yes, indeed it is. But this year, for me, those words simply wouldn’t go away. ‘All the footgear of battle, every cloak rolled in blood…’.
 
   Those words wouldn’t go away, and I think I know why. As soon as I read them this year, a clear image, or perhaps two images, sprang into my mind. The first was the picture of the bloodstained uniform of one of the soldiers shot in cold blood in Afghanistan, while training the Afghan police. The second was the two funeral hearses I recently saw making their way round the Oxford ring road, their coffins draped in the Union Flag. I was myself on the way to conduct a funeral, but I found that sight haunting and moving.
 
   That conflict in Afghanistan is just one element of the background against which we are celebrating Christmas this year. But it is an inescapable element. Another is the whole issue of the natural environment of our planet, and climate change. Just at the moment, global warming seems a very distant issue; it feels more like global cooling. Also the huge Copenhagen conference on the issue has recently ended in some confusion. There seem to be political agendas around not wholly driven by the scientific evidence; some of the supposed experts have not, it seems, behaved in an honest and transparent manner. But whatever the truth behind the confusion - whether in relation to the conflict in Afghanistan or to climate change – both these issues are global issues. Both are consequences of the need to think not just in terms of our corner of the world, but to think globally.  You can’t bludgeon a tribal society into a modern representative democracy, any more than you can wave a wand and control the weather. But we can no longer live in a comfortable little cocoon, and pretend that these issues have got nothing much to do with us. We can’t do that, however much we might like to, even at Christmas.
 
   For Christmas, if it celebrates anything, celebrates an event of global significance. Even the Gospel draws attention to that, setting it in the context of what St Luke calls ‘the whole world’, by which of course he means the whole Roman Empire. In the Second Reading St Paul puts it even more clearly, and gives it even wider significance: ‘God’s grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race.’ What we celebrate tonight is an event which took place at a particular point in time, and in a particular place. In immediate historical terms it was an event of extreme obscurity. In fact, historically speaking, there is very little that we can say about it with certainty.  Except the one thing which is really important, namely that it did take place. We do not know how many of the details with which the story of the birth of Jesus is surrounded are historical; how many of them are simply ways of expressing the significance of that birth. But that may not matter too much. For how in fact are we celebrating that birth? Not by dramatising the birth as such; not by performing a nativity play, but by celebrating the Mass. We celebrate the birth of Jesus in the context of his sacrifice. We celebrate this birth, a largely hidden event, by proclaiming his death, an event which no serious historian would deny.
 
    Our Christian faith is no cosy local religious cult as some would like to make it; it is of global significance. Our Christian faith is no fable; it is rooted in history. Isaiah’s extraordinary prophecy, too, has its historical context. Surely that mysterious prophecy which looks forward to the birth of a wonderful child who will bring peace, is not simply foreseeing an event seven hundred years later. He surely had his eyes on something much more immediate. In a small way, we can see the same process at work in our own time. In a time of disillusion, when our leaders seem simply to take us deeper into a morass, a new and younger face emerges. That person becomes the focus of a hope which lurks somewhere us all.  Didn’t the election of President Obama have something of this quality?
 
   Inevitably, however well they do, such figures never ultimately deliver what is obscurely hoped and longed for. The Roman Emperor Augustus, who features in the Gospel, is another such figure. He was not the universal Saviour. And yet, providentially, he did ensure a world peace which made possible the spreading of the Good news of Jesus the Christ throughout the then known world.
    
  The world has grown larger, but also smaller. No longer Roman roads link its cities and provinces, but aircraft and internet. We face now the issues with which I began, and indeed many others. They seem often so intractable as to overwhelm our hope. But nevertheless tonight we proclaim with hope and indeed with joy that ‘a child is born for us, a son given to us’. What sustains that hope and that joy? It is that we believe that in this child is revealed not just another human solution to the conflicts and problems we face, but the grace of God. And why should we believe that? Isn’t it, at least in part, because of the sheer paradox of it? For this ‘wonder-counsellor’  is no political giant, no mighty emperor, but one whose birth is witnessed by those social outcasts, the shepherds. His preaching and his actions proclaimed a God whose power was not that of physical or economic strength, but the power of love – in the end, the power of suffering love. So, as the acclamation in the Eucharistic Prayer so firmly states: ‘Lord, by your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free. You are the Saviour of the world.’
 
   In him the grace of God has been revealed; in him God himself has been revealed. So he calls us to a hope and a joy beyond the bounds of this world, but he also calls us to live within it. And he calls us, in his light, to address the issues of our present world soberly and without panic; to seek justice on a global view; and above all he calls us to that quality so lacking in our present world, a spirit of reverence – reverence before the mystery of God, and reverence before that creation and that humanity which God has made, and which he has in Jesus taken to himself.
 
 
 

3rd SUNDAY of ADVENT Year C (2009)

Today we call ‘Gaudete Sunday’. ‘Rejoice!’ Sunday. The underlying theme is the joy of salvation. The psalm sums it up best of all: ‘Truly God is my salvation; I trust, I shall not fear. Sing and shout for joy, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel’.
 
   The First Reading from the prophet Zephaniah proclaims that joy in relation to the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a turbulent place then; Jerusalem is equally a turbulent place now. The political powers have changed, and yet the salvation which the prophet predicts still eludes that city. The prophet speaks as if that salvation were a present reality: ‘The Lord is in your midst, you have no more evil to fear.’ The prophet’s vision is so vivid that he sees the salvation of Jerusalem, something which still has not come to pass, as a present reality.
 
    As we hear that prophecy again in the season of Advent, we hear it, of course, in expectation of Christmas. The birth of Jesus, the coming of the Christ, has made a decisive difference. ‘The Lord your God is in your midst’. We immediately hear those words as a pointer to the coming of Jesus the Saviour, the one who brings salvation. We can echo the words of the aged Simeon in the Temple at Jerusalem as he held the child Jesus: ‘My eyes have seen God’s salvation’. But at the same time, the salvation we seek still eludes us. The human race is still incapable of living in peace, incapable of sharing resources, incapable of really seeking the common good. We constantly fail to live in harmony with the God who nevertheless exults with joy over us and seeks to renew us by his love; we go our own way. Our disordered world is ravaged by disasters and diseases which shatter the lives of individuals and families. ‘Salvation’ is a very big word, but it must at least mean an end to these things. It must mean peace, it must mean life fully in harmony with God, it must mean healing and wholeness in the widest sense. We do not see these things around us, and yet we are asked today to rejoice with the joy of salvation.
 
    So there is a tension. A tension between where we find ourselves today and the salvation for which we hope, and in the light of which we are invited even now to rejoice. That tension may present itself in different ways depending on our circumstances. Often it presents itself in the tension between the present reality of war or some humanitarian disaster, and the vision of peace, security and plenty. But it may also present itself in a much more personal way. It may present itself in relation to a personal bereavement, for example, or in relation to a particular experience of illness. For me, this Sunday, it is particularly focussed by the illness of someone for whom we have been praying as a parish for over a year. A few months ago, we contributed as a parish to enabling Pauline, with her husband and their four children, to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes. Today she is receiving the Sacrament of the Sick in the context of the Sunday Mass.
 
    We do not often celebrate this sacrament in so public a context, but there are times when it is good to do so. The sacraments are actions of Christ – Christ who continues to act in and through his Body the Church. The priest as celebrant reminds us that it is Christ himself who is at the centre, but we are all involved. So, in this sacrament, the prayer of the Church, the prayer of all of us, is really important. I will be laying hands on her with silent prayer; I will be anointing her in the name of Christ. But in that action and in that silent prayer we are all involved; we are all invited to take part.
 
    And what are we praying for? We are praying for her complete wholeness and healing. We are praying that she will know, as fully as it is possible for her or any of us to know, the joy of salvation. For, in the end, that is what the healing ministry of Jesus, the healing miracles of Jesus, were about. They were signs of salvation. They were signs of the breaking in of God’s Kingdom in the midst of this world.
 
   Miracles still happen. They are not common, but they happen. So I believe we are right to pray for a miracle of healing for Pauline. But even if God does not grant a miracle of physical healing, through the Sacrament of Anointing, Pauline will be more closely and deeply united with the healing Christ – the Christ ‘by whose wounds we are healed’. Through this sacrament, whatever Pauline has to suffer will be linked to His suffering; ‘Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ My experience has been that in every case this sacrament brings a deeper level of inner peace – the peace of God which is so much greater than we can understand.
 
  And there is another dimension, too. Christ through this anointing will link Pauline to his Passion, so that whatever she has to suffer, and indeed whatever  those close to her suffer, becomes in itself a sort of prayer. St Paul has some mysterious words in his letter to the Colossians, in which he even speaks of ‘joy’ in this context: ‘Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf; and I fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ in my flesh on behalf of his Body, which is the Church.’ It is mysterious stuff; it is hard, perhaps, to make sense of it. But within the total context of what we celebrate today, in the total context of ‘the joy of salvation’ we can perhaps glimpse, or at least trust, that it does make sense.
 
    Jesus Christ went about healing others, but he did not heal himself – he did not avoid the path of suffering. Indeed we would not be able to celebrate the joy of salvation today; we would not be celebrating the approach of the birth of the one we proclaim at the Saviour of the World, if it were not for his Passion and Cross. It is Jesus Christ who walked that path of suffering; Jesus Christ who trusted his heavenly Father right to point of death; Jesus Christ who through death was raised up to fullness of life – it is this Jesus who is Lord; it is this Jesus who is Saviour; it is because of this Jesus that we can confidently and indeed joyfully proclaim the Good News of Salvation.
 
   As we do so we do not for one moment close our eyes or our hearts to the reality of our present world. We have to face the reality of personal illness, the reality of loneliness and isolation; we have to face the reality of the pain of bereavement and loss. We have no glib and easy answers to this personal suffering, as we have no simple prescription for the ending of the wraths and sorrows of the wider world. We cannot even, except in very inadequate pictures, give an account of what the Salvation we proclaim could really mean. But we hold to the truth that the God who renews us by his love truly has been, and truly is, in our midst. In that love crucified, in that love mysteriously triumphant in resurrection, we have encountered the deepest truth behind our universe, the deepest truth behind our humanity. ‘Gaudete!’ God has created us for joy, and we will not be disappointed of our hope.     

 

1st Sunday of Advent, Year C (2009)

I expect I am not the only person to have been somewhat bemused in the last few days to discover that global warming may in fact be global cooling. Bemused, perhaps, but not convinced. For the moment, I stick with the view that climate change is probably the greatest challenge facing the human race at present. Only my commitment to the hard-pressed tenor line in the Cherwell Singers concert next Saturday will stop me from taking part in ‘The Wave’ in London on that day. I hope the parish will be represented. The penalty for not going is buying a ticket for the Cherwell Singers Concert.
 
‘The Wave’, it seems, is about waving off our representatives to the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen beginning on December 7th.  But the Wave might, of course, be a Tsunami. ‘There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth nations in agony, bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves’. Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel a picture of the coming of the Son of Man; a picture of the end of the drama of the history of the world; the prelude to the final establishment of the Kingdom of God, the beginning of what St Augustine calls ‘the end which is without end.’ That is one of the great themes of Advent. It isn’t just a preparation for Christmas; it puts before us the theme of the ultimate purpose of creation. In the light of Jesus Christ we can face what looks like ultimate catastrophe with heads held high, because the last word is not agony and chaos, but redemption and liberation.
 
Those who have been following the daily Mass readings will over the past week have read the whole of the discourse of Jesus of which today’s Gospel forms a part. In the earlier part, Jesus looks forward to two events which probably formed the immediate historical context within which St Luke was writing his Gospel. He looks forward to the persecution of Christians. He looks forward to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in AD70. Both these events must have suggested to those involved in them that end of the world was at hand. No doubt there have been many subsequent moments in history when people have said, ‘This is such a terrible catastrophe that it must be a sign of the end.’ Earlier in this discourse, Jesus says, ‘Don’t be deceived. Terrible things will happen, but the end is not yet.’
 
As Christians, we live always between two ultimate crises. Both really are ultimate. The first is the crisis of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. That is where the powers of chaos, evil and death did their worst, and were defeated. It is because of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus that whatever happens we can hold our heads high. Whatever happens we have cause to be hopeful. The second crisis is ‘The End’, ‘The Second Coming of Jesus’, the Last Judgement. Jesus tells us (in a passage omitted from today’s Gospel) that when that final crisis arrives, the signs will be as clear to everyone as are the signs of approaching summer – the trees coming into leaf. There won’t be any room for wondering whether ‘this is it’ or not.
 
We live in between these two ultimate crises. Meanwhile the world is beset by various very serious, but ultimately lesser crises. 9/11. Tsunami. Financial meltdown. Climate change. A society ‘coarsened by debauchery and drunkenness’ (I quote today’s Gospel again).  In the face of such things, what is our call as Christians? Not to sit down and moan and wait for the end. Our call is to ‘watch!’; ‘Stay awake, praying at all times…’. Our call is to keep open to what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ. Our contribution, as the priestly People of God, is to keep open to God, but then to engage with the world of our own time and place. As St Paul puts it so splendidly in today’s Second Reading: ‘May the Lord be generous in increasing your love, and make you love one another, and the whole human race, as much as we love you.’ It is Advent. Don’t sit down. Stay awake. Keep waving. Keep walking.     

CHRIST THE KING (Yr B)

Today, as the culmination of another liturgical Year of the Church, we celebrate the Feast of Jesus Christ, the Universal King. The readings for this feast in this year provide us with two sharply contrasted pictures.
 
It is a long time since I visited Greece. But many of you will I am sure have been into Greek Orthodox churches where the rather severe figure of Christ – the icon known as the Christ Pantokrator - gazes down at you from the dome. This is the picture which immediately presents itself to me as I hear the words of today’s Second Reading from the Book of the Apocalypse. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the one who is, who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’ Indeed the word for ‘Almighty’ at the end of that passage is the same Greek word, ‘Pantokrator’ which is used for that icon; Pantokrator – the One who is Sovereign over all.
 
We pick up this same text again, of course, each year at the Easter Vigil. As the Easter Candle is marked with its appropriate symbols, the priest says these words: ‘Christ yesterday and today; the beginning and the end; Alpha and Omega; all times belong to him, and all the ages; to him be glory and power, through every age and for ever. Amen.’  Here too the Christ Pantokrator is proclaimed – the Christ who has all things, the whole universe, in his power. People sometimes speak of ‘the Cosmic Christ’. This is one picture which is presented to us by this feast of Jesus Christ, the Universal King.
 
The Gospel however provides us with a picture which is something of a contrast. The contrast is not total, because in St John’s Gospel in particular the majesty of Jesus always seems to shine through. You get the sense that whatever may be going on, Jesus is actually in some mysterious way in charge. Nevertheless, the contrast is there. Jesus is standing, bound and a prisoner, apparently at the mercy of Pilate, the representative of the Roman Emperor. An isolated human figure at the mercy of secular and worldly power. On the face of it, nothing could be further from an image of universal kingship. And the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus is a dialogue of incomprehension. The gulf that separates the two of them is marked in the other gospels by the total silence of Jesus. But here Jesus admits that he is a king, but a king of an unique kind. The essence of the kingship of Jesus is that he bears witness to the truth.
 
 It is this declaration of Jesus which leads to that famous and cynical rejoinder of Pilate, ‘What is truth?’ This second picture, the picture of the human Jesus before Pilate, gives a very different slant to the celebration of Jesus Christ as Universal King. But it is surely an equally important one, not least in our own time. An implication of Pilate’s cynical response to Jesus might well be that ‘truth’ does not exist, except as a word for what happens to be the dominant view. The view, therefore, that can be imposed by the dominant power. It may be the totalitarian power of an emperor or equivalent; it may be the power of a ruthless and fanatical minority; it may indeed simply be the  power of a majority vote. Our world provides examples of all of these. Whatever the status of such ‘truth’, Jesus stands before Pilate as a witness to a Truth which exists behind and beyond all such imposed ‘truths’. There is an ultimate truth, the truth of God, which is sovereign; an ultimate truth which stands in judgement over all human claims to truth.
 
You could also say that Jesus stands as a witness to the limitation of human notions of truth. For example, it is easy to say ‘resurrection from the dead simply does not happen’. That, after all, is our ordinary human experience. One would then naturally draw the conclusion that Jesus did not rise from the dead. It is a perfectly reasonable conclusion, even if it fails to deal adequately with the various phenomena which occurred following the death of Jesus. But to proclaim that Jesus is the Universal King is closely allied to that ancient Christian profession of faith that ‘Jesus is Lord’. And to say that Jesus is Lord is to say that it is ultimately Jesus who judges and indeed defines what is possible; it is ultimately Jesus who defines the limits of what can be thought or believed. If Jesus is truly Lord, we cannot pass judgement on the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of the apparent evidence that resurrection does not happen. Despite our everyday experience, the final truth about the world in which we live is that it is a world in which Jesus is Lord. And this Jesus who is Lord is Jesus who is indeed risen from the dead; Jesus ‘the First-born from the dead, and Ruler of the kings of the earth’.
 
So we have the two pictures. We have this amazing picture of the ‘Cosmic Christ’ – Christ who as Universal King embraces the whole created order. It is a picture which picks up that text from St John which we will hear on Christmas morning, ‘Through Him all things came into being; not one thing came into being except through him’. It reflects those astonishing words of St Paul in his Letter to the Colossians: ‘all things were created through him and for him. He exists before all things, and in him all things hold together.’  Does it make it harder to hold to this vision that we now have a very different conception of the size and age of the physical universe? In some ways it does. And yet I wonder if it really should. For we are concerned not simply with size or age, but with what is both conscious and personal. Someone once said, ‘the stars are much bigger and older than me, but I know they are there, but they don’t know that I am here’. We are concerned with a created material universe, but one which has at its heart what is both conscious and the personal.
 
And so there is the other picture of the vulnerable human person standing as a prisoner before the judge, and bearing witness to the truth. The First Reading from Daniel contains this vision of ‘one like a son of man’ coming into the presence of God. The vision foresees that the final achievement of God’s purpose for his creation will be brought about through the agency of a human person. So also St Paul links this Cosmic Christ to this same vulnerable human figure of Jesus. ‘God wanted all fullness to be found in him, and through him to reconcile all things, everything in heaven and everything on earth, making peace through his death on the cross.’
 
God has always been, and will always be, sovereign over his Creation.The One who was, and who is, and who is to come cannot but be Universal King. And yet we must always hold these two sharply contrasted pictures together. The Cosmic Christ and the Jesus who stands before Pilate and goes to the Cross – these two are one undivided Person. And the establishment of the full sovereignty of the Universal King is a dynamic process – a process into which we are in a small but significant way caught up through our Baptism. In and through Jesus Christ, the Creator is redeeming and renewing his creation from within.
So we continue to pray,  ‘Father, may your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.’ 
  

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Yr B)

This weekend we keep Remembrance Sunday. We remember those who have given their lives in war. There is a strange echo of this phrase at the very end of today’s Gospel. What St Mark literally says is that the widow ‘threw her whole life’ into the treasury; she gave her life.  We sometimes also say that those who died in war ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’. When we pray for them at Mass, we set them and their sacrifice in the context of what really is the absolutely final sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ. As a priestly people, we place them in the context of Christ’s priesthood and his sacrifice. This is at the heart of today’s Second Reading, and it is about this that I am going to speak today. We honour the dead, but in this year which has been designated ‘the Year of the Priest’ I trust that it will not be out of place, even on such a day as this, to speak of sacrifice and priesthood.
 
The Second Reading compares and contrasts the action of Christ and the action of the High Priest in the Jerusalem Temple.  The imagery is drawn from the sacrificial worship of the Jerusalem temple under the Old Covenant.  The high priest goes into the sanctuary each year taking with him the blood of the sacrifice. Jesus Christ enters once for all the heavenly sanctuary – the very presence of the living God – taking with him his own blood, his offering of himself on the Cross. The Letter to the Hebrews is sometimes regarded as a book out on a limb – as if it reflected a rather odd and quirky understanding of Christ. But in fact other mainstream Gospel texts reflect something of the same viewpoint. Perhaps the clearest is the statement of Jesus ‘Destroy this temple, and I will build it again in three days’. The evangelist then adds, ‘He was speaking of the Temple of his Body’. The idea that Jesus somehow took over and superseded the function of the Jerusalem temple is not confined to the Letter to the Hebrews.
 
The Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD70. With that, a central element of Jewish religion was destroyed at a stroke. In the time of Jesus the Temple was a place of endless animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice seems to have been a feature of practically every religion, every human search for God. Behind it lie various motives.   A sacrifice may be an act of thanksgiving; it may also be a sacrifice to atone for sin. It may have behind it various ideas of the nature of the God to whom sacrifice is made. But behind all sacrifice surely lie two things. First, an acknowledgement of the greatness of God and our littleness; God is Creator, we are creatures. Secondly, our sense that there is a gulf between us and God which somehow needs to be bridged – a gulf which has been enormously aggravated, if not actually created, by our pride and disobedience to God’s laws. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the high priest of the Temple going into the Holy of Holies – the symbolic place of God’s presence. He goes in once a year carrying the sacrificial blood, as an offering to atone for the sins of the people.
 
All these sacrificial rituals, and above all this last one, have now been superseded. Everything that the practice of sacrifice sought to achieve has now been achieved by Jesus the Son of God.  All previous sacrifice points to the one true sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
 
So much for sacrifice; what about priesthood? The role of the priest was essentially to offer the sacrifice. All that earlier Temple ‘priesthood’, indeed you could say all pagan priesthood as well, points in one direction. It points to the one real Priest, the One who has offered the one real sacrifice, the one really effective sacrifice. It points to Jesus Christ and the sacrifice in which he was both Priest and Victim. It points to Jesus, the Son of God ‘who has gone through to the actual presence of God on our behalf’.
 
But, says St Peter, addressing the body of baptised Christians in his First Letter, ‘You are a royal priesthood.’ The Church as a whole is a priestly body. The Christian community exists in the midst of the wider world, (among other things) to ‘offer spiritual sacrifices’. What does this mean?
 
The Christian community has received and accepted God’s revelation of the truth about the relationship between God and the world. We know that we owe everything to our loving Creator and Father. We know that the reconciliation of human beings with God and with each other – that reconciliation so desperately needed –  can only come about through the reconciling action of Jesus the Son of God. We believe that this reconciliation was demonstrated, and in an important sense actually achieved, on the Cross. Because of that faith, because of that knowledge of the truth, the Christian community, the Church of Christ, has a particular role in relation to God and the rest of God’s world. It was William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, who said, ‘The Church is the one organisation which exists for those who are not its members.’ It exists to relate to God in praise, thanks and intercession on behalf of the world. It exists to be an instrument of God’s reconciling love in every possible way. It exists, in fact, to have a priestly role, an ‘in-between’ role, a mediating role, between the world as a whole and God. It exists to be not a gathering of individual ‘priests’, but a priestly community, a priestly body in the midst of the world.
 
So, in the light of what I have said so far, how do the ordained people that we call ‘priests’ fit in to the picture? Pope Benedict was hoping that people would pray for them particularly during the ‘Year of the Priest’.
 
I began by speaking of Jesus, the one in whom all notions of priesthood come to fruition. Jesus is the one true Priest. As St Paul says, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’. There is a very important sense in which Jesus the Son of God is the only Priest. And I went on to speak about the body of Christians, the Church as a whole, as having a priestly function both in relation to God and in relation to the rest of the world. So why do we have people in the Church who are specially set apart as ‘priests’?  The answer is, I believe, extremely simple. Of course people like me lead pretty busy lives. There are all sorts of things we get up to in the course of our ministry. But in the end, behind all the activity, behind everything we find ourselves called to do, our fundamental business is to give our lives to being a sign, to being a pointer. We exist to remind the Church – the Church which carries this huge priestly responsibility in the midst of the world – that the Body is nothing without its Head. The priest exists simply to be a sign which reads, ‘All priesthood is Christ’s priesthood. He is the one true priest. At the Eucharist, and indeed in all the sacraments, it is Jesus Christ himself who presides, who celebrates.’
 
There is no priesthood to which any of us as individuals have a right; there is no priesthood of the Body collectively except in so far as it is united to its Head. The official documents say that the priest acts ‘in the person of Christ the Head.’ It sounds very grand, perhaps. But what it really means is that the ordained priest exists only for the sake of Christ, and for the sake of the Body. In a very important sense, the priest exists to be invisible.
 
It is surely for that very reason that Pope Benedict has asked us to pray particularly for priests this year. It isn’t particularly difficult to be visible. It isn’t difficult to make a show or throw your weight about. But to become invisible – to become invisible so that all that people experience is Christ; that is, at the very least, a work of the grace of God, and the work of a lifetime. 
 

 

The Feast of All Saints

At first sight, the focus of this Feast of All Saints is entirely on heaven. The Gospel ends with the words, ‘Your reward will be great in heaven’. The Second Reading looks forward to the ultimate vision of God. The First Reading gives us a picture of the worship of heaven, involving, of course, all the saints – ‘a huge number impossible to count’. It was with this in mind that initially I felt slightly irritated that this Sunday was also Bamenda Sunday. Indeed we are not only having the usual second collection for the Diocese of Bamenda, there is not only the annual leaflet about the projects we support there, but there has even been a message to be read out at all Masses. Why, I thought, should we have all this today, to distract us from celebrating this great vision of heaven?
 
But then, during the week, we had the Feast of the Apostles SS. Simon and Jude. And at Morning Prayer this verse from the Letter to the Ephesians popped up: ‘You are no longer aliens or foreign visitors; you are fellow-citizens with the saints and part of God’s household.’ Suddenly it all looked rather different. In Bamenda they are celebrating the Feast of All Saints today as well. The Diocese of Bamenda and its people are not a distraction from the celebration of all saints. I was, perhaps, tempted to think of them as somehow ‘aliens and foreign visitors’ imposing themselves on my attention. But in fact they are nothing of the kind. If they ever were ‘aliens and foreign visitors’, so equally was I; so equally were we. But now our situation is different. What we are celebrating today, and what they are celebrating today; what we are celebrating together today; what we are celebrating together as part of the universal communion of the Catholic Church, is that we are, all of us together, ‘fellow citizens with the saints and part of God’s household.’
 
The Preface for this feast suggests that we are all in a great hurry to get to heaven. It suggests that we simply can’t wait to meet the saints. I can’t say that is quite how I feel about it. Despite having attained the critical age of three-score years and ten, I still have a good many reasons for sticking around a bit longer in this life, if that is allowed to me. In that I expect I am not alone.  And, in any case, the speed or otherwise of our departure from this life is not in our hands. So the real question for us is about what we do with this vision of the saints in heaven as we continue on our earthly pilgrimage. Is it just a distant hope of a future reward? Or does it have a more immediate impact?
 
I believe it does have a more immediate impact, and in two ways. The first links with the other theme which runs through all the readings – the theme of persecution. The saints in their white robes are those who have been through the great persecution. Jesus in the Gospel tells us that we should rejoice if we are abused and spoken ill of. St John in the Second Reading reminds us that the world at large did not acknowledge Jesus, and therefore it is not surprising that it does not acknowledge us. There is, certainly, a good deal of violent persecution of Christians in our contemporary world. But as far as I am aware Bamenda is not a country where there is active persecution, nor is there here.
 
But one thing is certainly the case for Christian communities and individuals in both countries. It is that the values that Jesus and the Gospel call us to live by will often be at variance with those that are dominant in the secular culture. Bamenda will surely have its own particular tensions. Our secular culture is a culture of wealth and acquisitiveness; a culture of blame and compensation; a culture of power and success, a culture of self-advancement. The values of heaven, the values of the beatitudes in the Gospel, are values which constantly put others first, and have God at their centre. We are called to live in the midst of the world, and at its heart it is God’s world, but if we are really living our faith we probably should have a sense of being to some extent ‘aliens and foreign visitors’. If the shoe does not pinch, we perhaps need to ask why. Together with our brothers and sisters in Bamenda, our true and defining citizenship is with the saints; our fundamental loyalty is to the household of God.
 
That is one reason why the Mass is central to our lives. When we come to Mass we come simply as members of the household of God; we build out of our living bodies a temple which has Jesus as corner-stone; we are linked directly to that heavenly worship of the angels and the saints – that worship which has as its centre and focus the throne of God and the Lamb.
 
The second way in which this feast has an immediate impact relates precisely to the vision of the worship of heaven into which we are caught up at every Mass. It isn’t just about future reward. It is about the hope and the vision with which we live from day to day. Whatever may be happening in the world, whatever may be happening to us, we believe that in the end the world and all within it belongs to God, is loved by God, has been redeemed by God in and through Jesus Christ; the world is a place where God’s Spirit is at work; the world will be brought to that unimaginable completion which we call by the name of ‘the Kingdom of God’.  Whatever the setbacks and travails along the way, God’s purpose is the creation of a Communion of Saints, a communion of beings who reflect the image of God most perfectly seen in Jesus his Son, a communion of beings who reflect that communion of love which we now dimly perceive – the communion of Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

St Athanasius tells a famous story of St Antony of Egypt, one of the earliest ‘Desert Fathers’. St Antony was born in the year 251, and, amazingly, lived to be over a hundred. But when he was about twenty, after his parents had died, he was in church one Sunday, and heard today’s Gospel read. And it spoke directly to him. Unlike the young man in the Gospel, St Antony did not hesitate. He sold the considerable property that had been left to him by his parents. He gave most of the proceeds to the poor. He kept some of it to give to a community of religious women; he then entrusted to them the care of his sister; I suppose, whether she liked it or not. And then he went off to become a hermit, first of all quite locally, and then later much further from human habitation in the desert. There he lived in complete solitude for twenty years, before he allowed anyone to come and see him, or made any contact with the outside world. Twenty years for a deep interior spiritual struggle and journey.
 
   It is an extraordinary story. It is, I suppose, another example of the fact that by modern secular standards many of the great saints of the Catholic Church would be regarded as hopelessly unbalanced. Another example like that of the Curé d’Ars, whose death 150 years ago was celebrated in August, and who is the patron saint of priests; or indeed like St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose relics have been in Oxford this week and have aroused such intense interest and devotion.
 
   But all these three saints have at least one thing in common. Without the least compromise, they all made God the absolute centre of their lives. It was the Curé d’Ars who said ‘Oh what a beautiful life! How good, how great a thing it is to know, to love and to serve God! We have nothing else to do in this world. All that we do besides is lost time.’ That was St John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars. But it might have been said by any one of the three.
 
  We may greatly admire the devotion of these heroic saints, and no doubt we are aided by their prayers. But what about their example? None of us, probably, is in a position to respond to today’s Gospel as St Antony did. Perhaps the really crucial thing for us about the example of such saints is that they help us to believe in the reality of God. If some people can find such fulfilment and joy in such total abandonment of their lives to God, then they can hardly have been pursuing a delusion. Such lives may not be for us, but we are glad to be part with them of the same community of faith.
 
  St Antony heard today’s Gospel and responded to it as a personal call of Jesus to him. He was a rich young man, but his face did not fall, and he did not go away sad. But following his encounter with the young man in the Gospel, Jesus reflects on material riches in themselves. ‘How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!’ The disciples are astonished. It was a standard Jewish belief that riches were a sign of God’s blessing. We too find this teaching of Jesus a little disturbing, but for rather different reasons. For us, it does touch a nerve. We are all very aware of living in one of the rich nations of the world, in a world where still the majority of our fellow human beings live in poverty, and often extreme poverty. We do our bit through CAFOD; we may be beginning to wake up to the importance of the campaign to take steps to arrest climate-change; aware that here too it is the poorest who will suffer most.
 
    But beyond that, we have recently seen only too clearly what the effects can be of making an idol of wealth. We have seen the destructive effects not only on the people themselves but, much worse, on millions of ordinary people caught up in the effects of this blind greed. Back in the sixteenth century St Ignatius of Loyola saw riches as the first line of temptation used by the devil, the devil he so brilliantly called ‘the enemy of our human nature’.  Our culture may have carried the idolatry of the material to new heights, or at least spread it more widely in society, but it is nothing new.
 
   So far, you might say, we have been dealing in extremes. On the one hand there are those saints who have given up everything out of a passionate love for God. On the other hand there are those who have effectively made material things their God. The amassing of material wealth has been the centre of their lives.  We may belong to the rich world; the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel may have given us a little twinge, but most of us don’t belong quite at either extreme. It is pretty clear that we are not being called to give everything away to follow Christ. And although we may take a considerable interest in our material circumstances, they haven’t exactly become a substitute for God. But one thing is certainly true: each one of us is being called to follow Jesus. Our paths may be very different, but there is no doubt about the personal call. One of the loveliest touches in the Gospel is provided by the words, ‘Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him’. Jesus looks steadily at me and loves me.  It is true of each one of us.
 
   If that is so, then the real question is, what does Jesus say to me next? In the Gospel, what hindered the response of the young man to the call of God was his attachment to his wealth. But the key thing is not the wealth but the attachment. St Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises may speak of the temptation of wealth, but what he is really concerned about is attachment. What are we attached to in such a way that we cannot answer the call of Jesus to take the next step in our following of him? In what way are we not free at the moment to go where God is calling us?
  
    The rich young man is seeking ‘to inherit eternal life’. That would indeed be one way of describing the goal of the Christian journey. Another way would be to say that we are all, in the end, called to be saints. We are all called to be so transformed by love that to see God as God really is will be ultimate joy. But the journey to that place is a journey made up of steps – sometimes large, but often apparently quite small. As Cardinal Newman wrote, ‘I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me’. Today, through the Gospel, Jesus looks at me, and loves me. And within that loving look, he invites me to look at whatever may be holding me back from taking the next step along the path of following him.  It may be an unwillingness to forgive someone. It may be some habit or other. It may be a failure to give time to prayer. It may be almost anything, and it will be different in every case. But one thing will be true for each of us. If we are to be free of the attachments that stop us taking the next step, it will be by the work of God’s grace. It will not be by simply gritting out teeth. In the Breviary, the Opening Prayer of today’s Mass, much closer to the Latin original, goes like this: ‘Lord God, open our hearts to your grace. Let it go before us and be with us, that we may always be intent on doing your will.’ Lord, I want to be free. Lord, I want to do your will. Lord, open my heart to your grace.  
 
 

Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (2009)

The weekend before last I was at Mass in the Parish Church of Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria. It so happens that my great-grandfather was the Vicar there about 150 years ago. But I am delighted to say that now the main church notice board proclaims to all the world ‘The Parish Church of St Stephen, home to the Anglican and Roman Catholic communities of Kirkby Stephen’. The Catholic parish priest who celebrated the Mass had not been there very long. He was about 75 and Polish. He had been in England, I learnt, for 40 years, but his English was still a bit hesitant. The whole of that time until now he had ministered to Polish communities in this country. Anyway, he gave us a homily on the Rosary. He described how, as a boy, he and his friends had walked to and from school saying the rosary together. What a charming picture, but how far removed from our age and culture! I doubt if many of the good people of Kirkby Stephen are now saying the rosary in the street, but I think that a number of us probably felt not only charmed but challenged. Indeed I think there is generally a growing realisation that there is more to this prayer than perhaps some of us have recognised.
 
    Tonight we are going to bless a beautifully restored image of Mary, very effectively positioned in the Lady Chapel. Mary has many titles, reflecting the many aspects of her role. Our parish dedication is to Our Lady of the Rosary, and that is properly reflected in the much smaller but very beautiful image in the body of the church. Our new image is a very traditional one. But the inscription below gives her the title of ‘Mater Dei’, the Mother of God. She was and is truly the human mother of the One in whom Humanity and Divinity were and are inseparably united.
 
    The Gospel for this feast is the well-known story of the Annunciation, the very first of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. It is one of the most important moments in the whole Gospel, and indeed in the whole history of the world. But it is not on this that I wish to concentrate principally this evening. Rather it is on that lovely Second Reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
 
    The apostles are gathered in the upper room after the Ascension, waiting for the promised gift of the Holy Spirit. ‘All these joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.’ Of course we live in the time after Pentecost. The Holy Spirit has come. But even if our impulse to pray is the work of the Holy Spirit, as it is, we still pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’. The Spirit within us helps us to know how much we need the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The picture of the infant Church at that moment in the Book of Acts is a picture of the Church now – the Church to which we belong. Whenever we pray we are necessarily part of that picture. Even when we pray on our own, in our private room, we pray as members of the Body of Christ. We pray not only with our contemporary brothers and sisters, but also with the apostles; we pray as part of that community which has Mary at its very heart. Mary Mother of Jesus, Mary Mother of God, Mary Mother of the Church, Mary our Mother.
 
    The prayer of the Rosary perfectly reflects that. It is a prayer in which we come before our Father and contemplate the saving mysteries of the birth, life and death of Jesus the Son. And as we contemplate these mysteries, we are led ultimately and inevitably to give glory to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we pray this prayer not on our own, but with the Church. We come together with the apostles, the women and above all with Mary the mother of the Church. We share a little of her prayer as she kept all the mysteries of her Son and pondered them in her heart. Christian prayer may be in some ways a very private activity, but it is always in fact within that upper room. Whenever we pray we join that company, now much enlarged, with Mary at its heart. Why do we have images of Mary and the saints in our churches? It is surely precisely to remind us not of our past, but of our present; to remind us of the living communion of saints of which we are part.
 
   I began with the Polish priest who used to say the rosary with his classmates on the way to school. Some of you may have experienced ‘family rosary’ as children, but probably not many. We still give rosaries as First Holy Communion or Confirmation gifts, but how much do they get used? They are popular ornaments for many homeless people in Oxford, but seem more like charms than anything else. For many years there has been a distrust of just repeating set prayers. What has been emphasised, outside the Mass, is that personal prayer must come from the heart. Personal prayer isn’t just a matter of repeating formulae; personal prayer is about allowing my deepest inner reality to engage with the living God; my deepest inner reality with all its joys and sorrows, doubts and strivings.
 
     I think that was an important corrective. But I think we have also lost something which we need to recover. The oldest traditions of Christian prayer, based on its Jewish foundations, consecrated the day by praying briefly and formally, at particular times. The monastic office has preserved this for a small group. But the most obvious place where it has been preserved is in the Moslem community. We should be aware that what Mohamed learnt about prayer, he learnt from Jews and Christians. There is no doubt that this was how we once prayed. It may seem over-formal to us, but at least God was remembered several times a day, every day. God was the backdrop of every day, whatever it brought, however busy it was. And the Rosary was the prayer which replaced the monastic offices for many lay people, and especially for those who could not read.
 
   That discipline of formal ‘saying prayers’ as a framework for the day has, I suspect, for many people largely vanished. Now, most people pray if and when they feel like it; above all when they are desperate for help; sometimes when they are really thankful. Of course that is good. But all that modern spontaneity really belongs within a context which rather gets forgotten; the context of God without whose constant sustaining love from moment to moment we would simply cease to exist; a context of God without whose redeeming love revealed in Christ we would be directionless and lost. All that individual prayer that springs from the heart belongs also within that upper room – within that community which lives in the power of the Holy Spirit and seeks to give glory to the Father and Creator in union with the Son; within that community that has Mary at its heart.
 
    In the light of that it seems to me that we need to recover some aspects of that discipline of formal and regular praying as part of the life of every Christian. There is more than one way of doing this. It is certainly not about public display or prayer mats in the street. But the Rosary, which so beautifully encapsulates the praying Church, may surely help.  A decade of the Rosary does not take long; a rosary can be carried anywhere. A whole set of mysteries, five decades punctuating the day, might not be an impossible discipline even in our burdened and frantic world. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, help us to pray with you; take us to your Son; help us, in union with Him, to consecrate our world; to consecrate our nights, our days to the glory of God the Father.       

25th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

Last Wednesday I went to our Cathedral in Portsmouth to take part in the prayer and celebration surrounding the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Our Pastoral Area had been asked to contribute a brief meditation for one of the Stations of the Cross which would mark each half-hour of the Vigil through the night. Because we were the most distant, we were given the first half-hour, from 10.30pm. I don’t know whether anyone else from the Pastoral Area was in the crowded Cathedral at that time. Not surprisingly, no one from this parish wanted to accompany me. The relics will, after all, be coming to St Aloysius in Oxford from the evening of October 7th to the afternoon of October 8th.
 
   The relics had arrived in the Cathedral on Wednesday morning, even, I believe, getting a mention on the national News. Maura Dennehy from this parish attended the Mass with Anointing of the Sick in the afternoon, and I was able to concelebrate at the Mass of Thanksgiving at 7.30pm in the evening. The Cathedral was packed. The presence of an African choir gave a decidedly multicultural flavour to a profoundly joyful and prayerful atmosphere. The casket of the relics had been placed on the north side of the entrance to the sanctuary, and was surrounded by hundreds of votive lights. I was also present for the celebration of Night Prayer at 10pm – a wholly traditional celebration with Latin Psalms, concluding with the Salve Regina. The Vigil began a few minutes after this, and in all the spaces between liturgies a seemingly endless queue of people moved slowly up the Cathedral to spend a minute or two in prayer beside the relics. Even at 10.45 at night it took me half an hour to reach the front. And yet being part of that slowly-moving line of people of all ages and races was in itself a deeply prayerful experience.
 
   Two weeks ago, Annette Goulden spoke about St Thérèse after both the morning Masses in the parish.  She made the point that St Thérèse was very much a saint for today, and that she had much to say to people of all ages, and in particular to the sufferings and difficulties of people of all ages. Her family life as a child has often been depicted as extremely close and loving, as indeed in a way it was. But she also had to cope with the loss of her mother at a very early age, and with the departure of beloved sisters to become themselves Carmelite nuns. Another writer has gone so far as to speak of a ‘dysfunctional’ family, and in many ways that seems nearer to the truth. I recently also heard someone with a psychological background describe Thérèse as ‘a neurotic young woman’. In purely secular categories, that may well be true. But when we are thinking about saints we are not thinking in purely secular, this-worldly, categories. I am sure that there have been saints who could be described in secular terms as ‘balanced people’. But there are certainly a great many saints to whom that term could not possibly be applied. For one thing, it is surely, in secular terms, essentially unbalanced to be head-over-heels in love with God.
 
   Not everyone, not even every Catholic, is particularly responsive to the whole business of relics. And in a sense they are relatively unimportant. What is important is the living witness to Jesus Christ of the saint herself – the saint who remains a living member of the Body of Christ – part of that Communion of Saints to which we are inextricably bound by our baptism. Clearly for many people, the presence of that casket in the cathedral provided a powerful focus, a means of contact. Almost to my surprise, I found that was my experience too. And this passionate lover of Jesus challenged but also encouraged my own lukewarm love; this large-hearted intercessor for the conversion of the whole world challenged but also encouraged my own intercessory prayer – prayer which often feels feeble and half-hearted.
 
    It is extraordinarily appropriate that the Gospel this Sunday should address greatness and status. ‘If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last and the servant of all. He then took a little child…’ That text must surely have been a key text for St Thérèse. Her ‘Little Way’ is about using the little things of life, the everyday experiences and encounters, as a way to God. But it is also about the recognition of her own littleness and weakness in relation to the greatness of God; in relation to God’s love and mercy and grace. The religious culture in which she grew up very much encouraged the idea that we had to climb with tremendous effort the incredibly high stairway to heaven. In contrast to this, Thérèse made use of the image of a lift. If we make ourselves small enough, if we know that we can’t climb this stair by our own efforts, then God in his mercy will come down to our level and take us up in the lift. We are saved not by our efforts, but by God’s grace – by the God who in Jesus comes down to our level; the God who in Jesus shares our humanity, so that we may be lifted up to share his divinity.
 
   And today’s Gospel links with the witness of St Thérèse in another way. Jesus introduces the disciples, his closest circle, to the mystery of his coming suffering and death. But at that point even they did not understand, and were afraid to ask. They did not understand how suffering, at least suffering faced in a particular way, could possibly be a key part of God’s redemption of the world, part of the defeat of evil, part of the establishment of God’s Kingdom. It is not surprising that they were puzzled and even scandalised. I was talking to somebody about St Thérèse the day after my visit, somebody with a medical background. She too was scandalised that in her last illness St Thérèse had (as she had heard) refused treatment that could have reduced her suffering; she had actually courted suffering. It may sound ghoulish, if true. And there is no doubt that she genuinely longed for martyrdom. But there is also no doubt about what lay behind that longing. It was the longing to be as closely identified as possible with Jesus her beloved in his Passion. It wasn’t a longing for self-destruction, but a longing springing from the most intense love. And it was a longing for the conversion of sinners, a longing for the salvation of the world.
 
 In Catholic terms, this has often been understood as ‘making reparation’. In human terms, reparation only makes sense if the person who actually has done wrong tries to make up for the wrong to the person who has been wronged. In human terms, you can’t make reparation for somebody else’s wrong. In the light of the Cross, in the light of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ out of love for the whole world, the picture changes. It is still a mystery, but a mystery not of masochism, nor of the glorification of pain, but of love. St Thérèse must surely have echoed those mysterious and yet wonderful words of St Paul to the Colossians: ‘It makes me happy to be suffering for you, and in my own body to make up all the hardships that still have to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body the Church.’ In union with Christ, the acceptance of suffering can be not neurotic but redemptive. Wednesday was for me an unexpected and an extraordinary experience. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, pray for us.
  

22nd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

18th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

I have been reading this week a privately circulated Catholic critique of Philip Pullman’s trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. The author understandably gets very cross that Pullman’s vision of ‘life beyond death’ is presented as superior to the Christian view. It is, of course, no surprise that Pullman provides a complete travesty of the Christian view. However, the alternative he offers is one which clearly finds an echo in the hearts and minds of many people whose attachment to the Christian faith is somewhat slender. The comfort Pullman offers to the dead is that they return to the matter of the material world; they become part of the beauty of the earth and sky, the birds and the bees. Mourners at funerals, not generally Catholics, often ask for poems which express that sort of sentiment to be included in the service. Obviously, the Christian vision based on the resurrection of Christ is infinitely richer and more personal. But for those who do not share the Christian faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Pullman’s view does provide a crumb of comfort.
 
    Yesterday, at Holy Rood, we had a Requiem Mass for a remarkable Polish philosopher who died recently – Leszek Kolakowski. He began life as a committed Marxist and card-carrying communist. His thought evolved to the point where he became a fierce critic of communism, and an important figure in the process of change in Poland to which Pope John Paul II also contributed so signally. Obliged to leave Poland, he eventually became a Fellow of All Souls’ here in Oxford. While he never became a Catholic, Professor Kolakowski was fascinated by the idea of God. In a short essay simply entitled ‘On God’, he wrote this: ‘Even atheists….knew this: order and meaning come from God, and if God really is dead, then we delude ourselves in thinking that meaning can be saved. If God is dead, then nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. No trace remains of our lives and our labours; there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives towards no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes. Whoever says “there is no God” (and at the same time declares) “and all is well” deceives himself.’
 
     The contrast between Philip Pullman and Professor Kolakowski may seem a very long way from the Scripture readings we have heard today, and particularly the Gospel. And yet the same contrast is there. Last week we had the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. This week, in the Gospel Jesus says, ‘You are looking for me because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.’ ‘You may be looking for me, but you are unable to see beyond the material benefits.’ This limited view echoes the complaint of the People of Israel on the their journey through the desert – the complaint we heard in the First Reading: ‘Why did we not die in the land of Egypt, where we were able to sit down to pans of meat and could eat bread to our heart’s content?’ Egypt becomes the symbol of a materialist society. Indeed the old translation, ‘the fleshpots of Egypt’ has become proverbial. Egypt represents a society like our own, a materialist society, a society of consumers.
 
   In the Gospel, challenged by Jesus, the people ask what works God expects of them. The answer has always surprised me. You might expect Jesus to say ‘love your neighbour’, or ‘be honest in your dealings’. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything about works. He says ‘believe’. ‘Believe in the one God has sent.’ Prior to any ‘good works’ is belief - belief in God, and in the one he has sent; belief in Jesus, and - as we discover – belief in Jesus as the Bread of Life; Jesus as the one who has come down from heaven, the one who has come from God and gives life to the world.
 
    Acceptance of belief in God as absolutely central to our lives does not, I think, come particularly easily to us. If challenged, we would of course say that we believed. But we are people of our time and place. And what we pick up from the atmosphere around us is that belief in God is a very marginal affair. It can be helpful to some, and on the whole it is supportive of good social behaviour. It is a sort of prop to morality for those who need it. But I suspect that most of the time we are not conscious of its absolute centrality to our lives. Pullman the atheist tries to rescue something from the universe in which God has no place. Kolakowski the former atheist has come to see that belief in God is an essential ground for meaning and order in the world.
 
 
   In the Gospel Jesus speaks about himself as ‘the bread of God’, the bread which comes down from heaven. He speaks about himself as the source of true life for the world. Naturally, and indeed rightly, we link this to the Eucharist; we link it to the reception of Holy Communion. In Holy Communion we do indeed receive the Bread of Life which comes down from heaven; we are indeed fed by Jesus himself. That is a wonderful thing, but it is also easy to see it as just one aspect of our lives, much on a par with other activities. Indeed modern family life, in particular, often forces such comparisons upon us. Is it to be Mass, or the children’s rugby match this morning? Week-end activities are a positively good thing, and complex family diaries involve a good deal of juggling. We struggle in such circumstances to do our best for everyone. What should have the priority this week?
 
    But this Sunday we hear the Gospel of Jesus as the Bread of Life against a background which the Gospel itself suggests – the background of the feeding of the people of Israel in the wilderness. Often the stories we read in the Old Testament do little more than provide a foreshadowing of events in the New Testament. In such cases we give them a brief nod, but  little more. But today’s story is different. The wilderness journey of the people of Israel, this journey from slavery in Egypt to the holy land; this journey to the mountain of God with which today’s Psalm ends – this journey is a picture of the whole of our life journey. It is a hugely powerful image, not only with its clear direction and goal, but also with its lure back to the fleshpots. And according to this image, the Bread of Heaven is the only food. There are no other options. The people are entirely dependent on what God gives them. It is manna or nothing.
 
    Our journey through life is not simply a wilderness journey. We are not invited simply to see this God-given world with all its richness and delight simply as a barren wilderness. But if we are trying to make sense of the place of God in our lives; if we are trying to understand the place of the Eucharist in relation to all the other competing interests and claims upon us, then we need to hear today’s Gospel of the Bread of Life against the background of this journey of the People of God. We are that people. Whatever our daily life may contain, we are still as totally dependent on God. There is a real sense in which we have no other food. ‘Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.’ This is the bread which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Lord, give us this bread always.
 

17th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

This year, as you will be aware, we have been reading through the Gospel according to St Mark. Last week we were on the threshold of the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. And that is, indeed, the story which we have just heard. Except that it doesn’t come from St Mark’s Gospel; it comes from St John. For the next four weeks we are switching. We are going to be reading that remarkable chapter 6 of St John’s Gospel where Jesus proclaims himself to be the ‘Bread of Life’. It is a very clear invitation to some sustained reflection on the meaning of the Eucharist.
 
   That indeed may well be the direction in which we will go. But today we have the story itself of Jesus feeding of the five thousand, rather than the reflection and dialogue which follows it. And we also have a number of other concerns. One of them is, of course, ‘swine ‘flu’, and what may or may not seem to you the rather severe recommendations which Bishop Crispian has asked us to follow, as a result of the risks of spreading this infection. I realise that at least one person in the parish has been very severely ill as a result of it, and this must have been a very anxious time for the patient, as well as for her family. I don’t want to minimise the nastiness of the disease in some cases. And I certainly believe our Bishop when he says his concern is a pastoral concern for the most vulnerable. However, some of you may feel that there has been a bit of an over-reaction in the Church – an over-reaction led, as so often these days, by a sensationalist over-reaction in the media. Once again, the leading idea seems to be the elimination of all risk. The recommendations we are asked to put in place may at one level be simply sensible, but the underlying message they convey to me is, once again, that life is a mine-field. We are to live in constant fear of awful things that lurk round every corner. It is in some ways a situation similar to that to which I referred last week – the assumption challenged by the author Philip Pullman that anyone who came to read to schoolchildren was likely to be wishing to prey on them.
 
    I think that this obsession with risk is doing damage to our society as a whole, but my concern today is precisely with the recommendations in the context of the Eucharist. It is partly a matter of language. I have found it distressing that journalists have been referring to Holy Communion as if it were simply some kind of arcane and meaningless rite that Christians got up to, but which they could easily abandon for a few weeks if it seemed convenient. Whereas in fact the celebration of the Eucharist is a central expression in word and sacrament of our faith in a God of love who has great and wonderful purposes for us; who has created us and this whole universe out of love; who in the person of Jesus Christ has shared our very humanity; who in Christ and through the Holy Spirit is drawing us into a fulness of life and of love beyond all imagining. And central to this vast, unmerited and glorious gift, is the very presence and life of our risen Lord shared with us in the sacrament of his Body and Blood.  In the light of that truth, and that reality, it seems to me that all this risk-avoidance is just a distraction, and indeed a rather pernicious and even faithless one.
 
   And this leads me to the second concern which is before us today. This Sunday has been designated by our Bishops as a ‘Day for Life’. Each year they ask us to focus on some aspect of the precious gift of life, and specifically of human life. Each year, whatever aspect of life is chosen, the key word for us, surely, is ‘gift’. Why do we proclaim that human life is to be cherished from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death? The answer to that question lies in the word ‘gift’. We believe that every life is created by God; that every life is a gift of God; that our lives are not just our own possession to do what we like with. ‘God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning to its end.’  It is this conviction that our life is a gift of God which is the driving force of all our attempts to stop its wanton destruction.
 
   Euthanasia and assisted suicide are back in the headlines today. Very recently a further attempt to change the law on this was made in the House of Lords. The arguments which still manage to defeat such attempts are arguments about slippery slopes – about the difficulty of drawing lines and preventing abuses. They are good arguments and they work – so far. But they are not the arguments upon which the Christian opposition to euthanasia finally rests. We rest our case on the truth that human life is God’s creation; that God has made us in God’s image to share God’s life. They rest on the conviction that life is God’s gift.
 
   And at this point we find an important link to that story of the feeding of the multitude which we heard in the Gospel. It most obviously links with the Christian imperative to feed the hungry. Pope Benedict in his recent encyclical points out that this is an inescapable duty. His concern, and indeed our concern, is ultimately with what he calls ‘integral human development’. We long for all humanity to come to their full potential in every way. And without food and water they can get nowhere. But the Gospel is also a sign which points to that ‘integral human development’. St John tells us that the feeding happened at Passover-time. It happened at the moment when the great delivery of God’s people from slavery and their journey into the promised future was being celebrated. The feeding of that vast crowd with food which is evidently pure gift from God is a picture of God’s total saving purpose for humanity. In and through Christ, God will bring humanity to the fulfilment he plans for us, and he will pick up the pieces left over so that nothing gets wasted. Our vision, which we celebrate each week, is that our whole life is entirely gift. It is this that the annual ‘Day for Life’ reinforces and celebrates in a particular context.
 
   This year we are asked to focus on the difficult issue of suicide. The call is to awareness and to compassion; we are invited to ask whether we are doing what we can as a supportive community to help to sustain those who are struggling with profound depression or various forms of mental illness; and indeed those who seem almost suddenly to come up against a blank wall of despair. Such support is not easy, and it is not always possible to spot the danger signs. It is however important to be reminded of those words from the Catechism repeated in today’s leaflet: ‘We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutory repentance. The Church prays for those who have taken their own lives.’
 
  We will indeed pray. And we celebrate today, as we do each week, the God who gives us life as a gift; the God who is revealed to us in Christ who out of love for us endured the utter darkness of the Cross; the God who calls us to share that love with others; ‘the One God who is Father of all, through all and within all.’
     

 16th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

Last week Jesus sent his apostles out on a preaching tour. We don’t actually hear how the apostles got on. However, by this Sunday they have returned to Jesus. They are obviously pretty exhausted by it all, and he wants to take them off by boat for a day’s retreat. ‘There were so many coming and going that the apostles had no time even to eat.’ But what actually happens, of course, is that the wretched crowd guess where Jesus is off to, and manage to get there first and be waiting for him.
 
   Under such circumstances, most of us would probably have spotted the crowd on the shore, turned the boat round and headed in the opposite direction. After all, we would have earned our break. But not Jesus. The Gospel ends with those wonderful words, ‘He took pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he set himself to teach them at some length.’
 
   When I first looked at the readings for this Sunday, they seemed to be largely addressed to the clergy. We are supposed to be the shepherds, subject, of course, always to the Good Shepherd himself. We are supposed to be the shepherds, and the first reading gives us a good dressing down for failing to do our job properly. And the Gospel seems to suggest that we shouldn’t take a day off, either. Not particularly encouraging for the clergy, and not, on the face of it, much help to anyone else. But then I began to wonder whether in fact these readings might not have a much wider application.
 
   In the first reading from the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord isn’t actually addressing the clergy. He’s having a go at the anointed shepherd Kings of Israel and Judah. And he is looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, the true king, the good shepherd. This shepherd king will gather the scattered people into one; this shepherd king will come and will reign with justice, and bring about peace and reconciliation. The one to whom Jeremiah looks forward is the Good Shepherd who was moved with compassion at the plight of this great aimless crowd of humanity; the Good Shepherd who takes pity on them because they are like sheep without a shepherd.
 
    It was, I think, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple who said that the Church is the one organisation which exists for the benefit of those who are not her members. The Church exists in union with Jesus her Lord to give glory and praise to God on behalf of the world. That is her priestly function. And the Church exists to spread the Good News of God revealed in Jesus her Lord to all the world. That is her prophetic function.
   
   In the light of that, I began to see this Sunday’s readings not in terms of the relationship of the members of the Church and the clergy, but in terms of Jesus the Good Shepherd and his compassion for the whole of humanity. And this is a perspective which is encouraged by the Second Reading, again from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Today he addresses ‘those who used to be so far apart from us’. Those he is addressing are of course now members of the one Body of Christ. They have joined the Church. But in the sentence immediately before the beginning of today’s reading he speaks of where they have come from – what their state was before they were linked to Jesus Christ through baptism. They were, he says, ‘without hope and without God’. They were, whether they used the term or not, in practice ‘atheists’.
 
   We have, perhaps, to be careful. It not necessarily true that all atheists or agnostics are ‘without hope’. They do not, of course, share that central Christian hope which rests on the resurrection of Jesus. But Philip Pullman’s recent stand for the fundamental trustworthiness of human beings was a position of hope. His stand against being checked for criminality before he could read his stories to schoolchildren was a challenge to the current default position of distrust. This position against which he was standing, one of fundamental distrust, is a position of despair, and less in line with a Christian world-view than Pullman’s, despite his atheism. But nevertheless it does appear that a great many of those around us do seem in an important sense to be ‘without hope’. They do seem to be to be rudderless, directionless. They do seem to be very like those upon whom Jesus had compassion in the Gospel. They do seem to be very like ‘sheep without a shepherd’. And for all the protestations that morality can survive without having had at some point a foundation in religious faith, I am not sure that this point is proved.
 
   Jesus was concerned for this relatively rudderless, directionless mass of humanity. In the Second Reading, St Paul presents Jesus as the one in whom the great wall dividing God’s chosen people the Jews from the rest of humanity has been broken down. He is the New Man in whom all the divisions of humanity are overcome; he is the New Man in and through whom all humanity is potentially included in God’s Chosen People. How does this come about - this restored relationship with God?  The possibility of the breaking down of the walls of all kinds that divide the one human race? St Paul is convinced, and we share his faith, that it comes about through the action of God in his Son Jesus Christ. St Paul is convinced, and we share his faith, that it comes about through the power of the Cross of Jesus, through that ultimate manifestation of the power of love made visible in weakness.
 
   The mystery of the Cross is at the heart of our faith. But mystery it surely is. The Good Shepherd who is also the Lamb of God is also at the heart of our faith. And Jesus who showed such compassion for human beings, whether individually or in crowds – he is himself both Shepherd and Lamb. Through such images we begin to grasp the mystery of God’s saving work. Through the Mass itself that mystery takes hold of us. The Lord himself says to us: ‘This is my Body; this is my Blood’. He unites us to himself, he takes us into the mystery, so that through us he may continue to be there for those who, in whatever way, are like sheep without a shepherd.
 
    But today’s Gospel which invites us to engage with others also invites us to go apart. If our lives, which are so much more than our words, are to be at the service of the Good Shepherd and of the Good News, then we also need not to be totally swamped by the comings and goings of life. ‘Come away to some lonely place by yourselves and rest awhile’. It is an invitation which challenges us to look at the place of prayer in our lives. This may take many forms, according to temperament and opportunity. This week’s Newsletter offers two possibilities of prayer with others. It also draws attention to a leaflet detailing a number of very varied resources for personal prayer available on the internet. (This leaflet, ‘Developing a Daily Practice of Prayer: How the Internet Can Help’ is distributed by the diocesan Spirituality Development Group)  If we take time to open ourselves to God in prayer, we can be sure that he will not fail to use us, whether we know it or not, to draw others to himself.    
 

15th SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME YEAR B

In the Liturgy of the Word at Mass everything builds up towards the Gospel, towards the words or actions of Jesus himself. We read the Old Testament because it prepares for the coming of Jesus. With the Second Reading we are in a sense looking back to Jesus from the experience of the first Christians. So the Gospel is surrounded with special solemnity. We stand, rather than sit, to listen. We honour the Gospel with candles, and even sometimes with incense. But I’m not sure that on this occasion the content of the Gospel quite deserved it. You could sum up the content of today’s Gospel in one line: ‘Jesus sent out the twelve apostles to preach and to heal’. The Gospel says Jesus sent them out. He doesn’t say much about their message. On this Sunday, the big message is in the Second Reading.
 
    It is an amazing passage from the Letter to the Ephesians. It is also, in the original, the longest sentence in the whole of the New Testament! And it is this that I want to look at more closely. It is such a dense passage it could be the source of a dozen homilies. What I want to do today is just to put a little bit of it under the microscope. Because it presents us in one form with the heart of the amazing Good News of God. It presents us with what, eventually, the apostles went out to proclaim. It presents us with the ground of the defeat of evil; the ground of humanity’s ultimate healing.
 
  ‘Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. You could say that is the fundamental statement we make every Sunday when we come to Mass. That is what we are about. We believe that we, and all creation, are brought into being and held in being by God. And so each week we come to bless and thank the God who has created and who continues to creates us. But there is more than that. We believe that we can say something very specific about the God we bless and thank. The God to whom our thanksgiving is addressed is exactly the God whom Jesus Christ addressed; the God Jesus addressed as ‘Abba, Father’. ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’
 
   That, you could say, is relatively straightforward – if belief in God can ever be described as ‘straightforward’. But what about the next bit? ‘God has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ’. One thing there is straightforward. We started by blessing God. Why should we bless God? The answer is, ‘because God has blessed us ’. Blessing starts not with us, but with God. We bless God because we recognise that all that we have is in fact gift. All that we have is a gift from God.
 
   That is true, but it isn’t quite what the Scripture says here. It says something more mysterious. It says ‘God has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.’ Notice that it doesn’t say that God will bless us in this way. It says that God actually has already blessed us in this way. We already have ‘all the spiritual blessings of heaven’. What on earth does that mean?
 
    Well, first of all, what do we mean by ‘heaven’? We can no longer think of heaven simply as ‘up above the sky so high’, although that is still an image which the word itself implies. It still works to some extent. We can still think of God as exalted far above or beyond us; infinitely greater than us. Heaven is, essentially, the place of God’s being. We can even use ‘heaven’ instead of ‘God’. (Occasionally we hear phrases like ‘Heaven defend us’, meaning ‘God defend us’.) So what are ‘the spiritual blessings of heaven’ – these blessings which we have already received?’
 
   First of all, they are not ‘spiritual blessings’ in contrast to ‘material blessings’. St Paul often contrasts ‘spirit’ with ‘flesh’. And when he does this he isn’t contrasting ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’. Still less is he saying that the spiritual is good and that the material is bad. For St Paul, the contrast is between being cut off, or separated, from God on the one hand, and on the other hand being open to God, being in a living relationship with God. So the spiritual blessings of heaven are the blessings of actually living now in a real and living relationship with God. That is what we are invited by this Scripture to give thanks for. Here and now, in this world, we are able to live in a real and living relationship with the God who has created us. How on earth can that come about? The simple answer is – ‘in Christ’. ‘God has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.’
 
   ‘In Christ’. That is a formula we use constantly, almost without noticing: ‘in Christ’; ‘through Christ’. It is, surely, closely linked with that other expression we frequently use – ‘the Body of Christ’. By our baptism we are linked into Jesus Christ as a part of the body is linked in to the whole. We are not just followers of Jesus Christ as a prophet or teacher. We are limbs, members, of Christ. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. For the work of the Holy Spirit is to make relationships – to link Father to Son; to link us to Christ. The Christ to whom we are linked is the risen and ascended Christ; the Christ who with his glorified wounds has returned to the Father. We are one Body with him. So the blessings we share are spiritual blessings; they are the gift of the Holy Spirit. And they are, even now, the blessings of heaven.
 
    In the First Eucharistic Prayer, we pray that God’s angel may take this earthly sacrifice to God’s heavenly altar. What we do at Mass is linked to the eternal reality of heaven. However little it may sometimes seem like it, by our sharing in the Eucharist, we are indeed caught up into heaven. Indeed, in communion we receive the total reality of the crucified, risen and glorified Christ. He is in us, and we are in him. God indeed blesses us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ. We are sacramentally united with Jesus Christ, the beloved Son of the Father. We are renewed in our baptismal status as adopted sons and daughters of the Father – sons and daughters not just in virtue of our creation by God, but sons and daughters ‘in Christ’. Sons and daughters ‘in the Beloved’; sons and daughters by incorporation into the Body of Jesus the Son.  ‘Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.’
 
   When I was very young, I remember meeting one of my young acquaintances in the street, walking along very determinedly with a small spade over his shoulder. I greeted him. In response he said, very firmly: ‘There’s something wrong with this world, and I’m going to find out what it is’. I never discovered the result of his investigation. But his instinct was surely quite correct.  The Second Reading speaks of God’s plan from the beginning. God, being eternal God, mysteriously sees his whole design from beginning to end.  He sees the whole design from beginning to end, but yet leaves our freedom intact. That is a paradox beyond the scope of our minds. But there is ‘something wrong with this world’, and it takes the blood of the Beloved Son, it takes the passion and cross of Jesus, to overcome the wrong, the separation from God. It takes the blood of the Beloved Son, it takes the passion and cross of Jesus, to defeat the evil and to bring about the costly reconciliation.
 
    But God’s purpose has not been and never will be defeated. God has made us in his image, in the image of his Son, to ‘live through love in his presence’.  Made in his image, we human beings have a special place in God’s ‘hidden plan’. But that plan embraces not only us but all creation. It embraces ‘everything in the heavens and everything on earth’.  Through our baptism we are ‘in Christ’. Through Eucharist and Holy Communion our relationship with God in Christ is renewed and strengthened. Through the Mass we taste, we have a foretaste, of the ‘spiritual blessings of heaven’. But we look forward, too, with confidence to the fulfilment of God’s ultimate purpose of love: his ultimate purpose to bring all things together in Christ, all things in heaven and all things in earth, to the praise of the glory of his grace.

12th SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME Year B

‘Who is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’ Today’s Gospel presents us with a very dramatic picture. The disciples of Jesus are in a boat caught up in a storm which threatens to overwhelm them. They are terrified. Jesus, meanwhile, is simply sleeping through it all. They are struggling to keep the ship afloat; he might as well not be there, for all the help he is. It is a dramatic story, and it is a vivid metaphor for other life experiences which many of us have been through from time to time.
 
    In three weeks’ time it will be ‘Sea Sunday’. We will be asked to pray particularly for those in peril on the sea. That particular peril is not part of the experience of most of us. But the experience of situations where the stresses and strains of life seem overwhelming, and God seems to be asleep – that is surely something with which many of us can identify. It may be the struggle to make ends meet; it may be the struggle to balance work and family; it may be the struggle with some vicious illness in ourselves or someone close to us; it may be the struggle to work through a difficult period in a relationship. In any of these situations, and many like them, we can make our own that heartfelt cry of the disciples in the Gospel, ‘Master, do you not care? We are going down.’ ‘Don’t you care?  We are simply being overwhelmed!’
 
    If we are in that sort of place, then that is a real and a proper prayer. You could say that Jesus himself prayed a version of that prayer on the Cross. In that darkness and agony, in the midst of that overwhelming storm, he too cried out to his Father. He made his own the words of the 22nd Psalm: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ One response to the cry of Jesus on the Cross was that of some of the bystanders. ‘He’s calling for Elijah’; ‘Perhaps the prophet Elijah will come and save him.’ But no such miracle occurred. God seemed to be asleep. But despite that, the final cry of Jesus from the Cross is the cry of commendation to the Father. ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ It was the final act of trust in the Father who seemed to be absent. After that cry, Jesus died. Jesus slept in death. There is almost a foreshadowing of that in today’s Gospel. In the midst of all the danger and turmoil, Jesus was asleep on a cushion. He could sleep because he could trust. Even in the midst of the storm, he had absolute trust in his Father.
 
    The contrast between the behaviour of Jesus and the behaviour of his disciples could not be more absolute. You could even say that they are living in different worlds. The disciples are living in the world which we inhabit most of the time. At this moment their world is bounded by the waves that are threatening to swamp and overwhelm them. It is very difficult to see beyond the immediate terror. Jesus is living in a world which is entirely open to the mystery of God  - God who holds all this chaos in the palm of his hand. Indeed, as it turns out, he is absolutely one with that mystery – that mystery of God who somehow embraces all this darkness and confusion. The First Reading from the Book of Job gives a little taste of  the mystery of God speaking from the heart of the tempest. Jesus in the Gospel, at one with that mysterious God – Jesus rebukes the poor wretched disciples for their lack of trust. As if they should be able to see as he sees. As if they should know that God is there in the heart of the tempest. But they are living in different worlds. Not perhaps, in what might be called ‘parallel universes’. Rather in two worlds which can be pictured as one inside the other.  The world of the disciples is like a closed box; the world of Jesus is open to the greater mystery and truth beyond. At first, the disciples, boxed up in their world, are terrified; Jesus, open to the greater world, really living in the context of the greater vision, is peacefully and trustfully sleeping. But then Jesus rebukes not the disciples but the storm. ‘Be quiet now! Be calm!’ And the wind dropped, and all was calm again.
 
    Jesus is one with the disciples in his humanity; Jesus is one of us.  Jesus shares fully the humanity of his disciples, but, while doing so, he is able to speak with the voice of God from the heart of the tempest. It is one of those moments when the divinity of Jesus shines through; when the disciples can only worship. They were filled with awe, and said to one another, ‘Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.’ At that moment, the disciples were overwhelmed, but not by the waves. They were overwhelmed by Christ. They were overwhelmed by this man in whom they felt bound to say that they encountered God.
 
In the Second Reading, St Paul is writing out of a comparable experience. ‘The love of Christ overwhelms us.’ He too is talking about two worlds. There is the old world which is closed to God; the old world where people live for themselves; the world where I am the centre of my universe and the world revolves around me. That was a world which Jesus Christ once inhabited. He was born into that closed world.  It was that world closed to God which pushed him out onto the Cross. And then there is the new world which Jesus also inhabited, and still inhabits. This is the world wholly open in love to God; the world in which people find their true selves. And they find their true selves not by self-preoccupation, but by putting God at the centre. As Jesus himself said, ‘My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.’ (Jn.4.34) My will is to do the Father’s will. The supreme expression of that overwhelming love was in his self-offering on the Cross. It was through that moment of supreme darkness that the breakthrough was made from the old closed world into the new world of God’s love. There was now a new option. We don’t have to live in the old world closed in by death. We now have the option of being part of God’s new creation – the new beginning of the human race which God has made in the person of Jesus Christ. This is a possibility for the whole human race; God wants all to be saved. But for us it is not just a possibility, it is a present reality.
 
     Whatever our state of life, whatever our age, we all come to Mass each week to rediscover that the world which so often seems a closed system is in fact open to God – open to the God whose overwhelming love, revealed in Jesus Christ, embraces the whole universe. We come to make Eucharist, and to be united to the Lord who in trusting faith slept peacefully in the midst of the storm. With him, and with the Psalmist, we sing with confidence: ‘O give thanks to the Lord, for his love endures for ever.’   
 

CORPUS et SANGUIS CHRISTI Year B (2009)

On this Feast, the Opening Prayer speaks of the worship of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed we offer that worship every time we come into Church. We remember that the Sacrament of the Body of Christ is present in the tabernacle, and we genuflect. Sometimes, of course, we genuflect as a matter of habit, hardly remembering why we do it. But we hope that that action, performed as a matter of habit, will trigger a reminder in our minds and hearts that we have come into the presence of Christ himself.    Sometimes we do it inappropriately, because in fact, as on Holy Thursday, the tabernacle is empty. Even when the tabernacle is empty, the altar is still there as a symbol of Christ and a reminder of his sacrifice. So we bow. But we don’t worship the altar. The altar is not God. But in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in the bread and wine after it has been consecrated, we recognise the real presence of God.
 
This feast of Corpus Christi is above all a feast of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is a sort of extended genuflection. It powerfully reminds us of our faith in that mystery, and it reinforces it. And of course it is a mystery. We cannot fully understand how the reality of this little piece of bread, this cup of wine, can become not bread and wine, but the real presence of our Lord Jesus Christ in the fullness of his humanity and his divinity. But that is our faith.
 
We cannot fully understand the mystery. But as so often with the central mysteries of our faith, it is easier to understand what is not true than what is true. It is quite easy to understand the bread and the wine of the Eucharist as mere symbols. It is easy to understand them as simply reminding us of the presence of Christ if we happen to be awake and alert. But the reality which they present to us is not something which depends on our state of mind, or the power of our imagination. Christ has died, and Christ is risen, and Christ is really present in the Eucharist, whether we are awake or asleep.
 
Again, in the early days of the Church, Christians were understandably accused of cannibalism. Outsiders got the idea that they were actually feeding on human flesh and blood. As if we were somehow returning to the moment of the crucifixion of Jesus and forgetting the resurrection. But everything we say and do now as Christians flows from the resurrection of Christ. Not that the Cross has been abandoned or forgotten; far from it. All that the Cross means has been taken through death into resurrection. The wounds of Christ are still there, as they were when the risen Lord appeared to the disciples; they are still there, but they are glorified. The Second reading reminds us of this, when it speaks of Christ entering the heavenly sanctuary. Through his resurrection and ascension he has entered the heavenly sanctuary, he has returned to the Father, but taking with him his own blood; taking with him the saving reality of his suffering and death on the Cross, that death which he suffered out of perfect obedience and perfect love.
 
So on this Feast of Corpus Christi we are not speaking of cannibalism, and we are not speaking of mere symbolism. We are remembering that the reality of the Sacrament of the Eucharist is Christ himself. He is really present, truly God and truly human, as he was in his earthly life. But he is really present in a manner which is appropriate to his risen and glorified state. And he is really present in a way which is appropriate to his present disciples. We are no longer a little group concentrated in one small part of the Middle East. We are spread throughout the globe. Through his sacramental Body and Blood, the risen and living Lord is able to be fully present to his disciples in every time and in every place.
 
He is able to be present in a manner which enables us not merely to worship him from afar, but actually to be united with him. As Jesus says in St John’s Gospel: ‘In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.’ Jesus gives himself to us as the Bread of Life for communion. He gives himself to us so that we may be taken up into his self-offering in love to the Father. That is what we celebrate at every Mass. That is at the heart of all our thanksgiving. And into that offering we gather up the needs and the longings of the suffering world in the midst of which we live.
 
Ultimately, our Lord Jesus Christ has given is his sacramental Body and Blood for communion. He has given them to us so that we may be one Body with Him. He has given them to us so that we may live with his life. But over the centuries the Church has discovered the value of Eucharistic Adoration. There is an important sense in which this is always a prelude to communion. It would be quite wrong only to expose the Host, the sacramental Body of Christ, in a monstrance on the altar, and never allow it to become for us the Bread of Life. But having said that, there is no doubt that in practice there has been great value in making the Sacrament of the Eucharist a focus for prayer. The Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a presence for communion, but the awareness of that presence in the tabernacle has been a great help to millions of people who have sought at other times to come close to Christ in prayer. And not only that. To pray before the Blessed Sacrament, whether in the tabernacle or more formally exposed to view on the altar in a monstrance, can have an influence on the moment of Holy Communion. To make the Lord’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament a focus for prayer is a great help to deeper awareness and greater reverence when I actually come to receive the Lord in Holy Communion during Mass.   
 
You may be aware that a century ago, or indeed less, receiving Holy Communion was severely restricted. Some people, particularly from abroad, are still unwilling to receive Holy Communion unless they have been to confession beforehand. By this, and other practices and devotions, people prepared carefully for this encounter with their Lord and God. For a long time now, frequent communion has been encouraged. Indeed it is right that those who share in the Mass should normally receive Holy Communion on each occasion. But  there is also the danger of receiving the Body and Blood of Christ too casually; being fed with the real presence of our crucified and risen Lord almost without paying attention to what is happening. It is a danger which is there for a priest as much as anyone else. Let us give thanks for this feast of Corpus Christi; this feast which challenges us to examine ourselves about our awareness and our reverence in approaching the Eucharist; this feast which reminds us that, like St Thomas, I can only say as I approach, ‘My Lord and my God’.
 

TRINITY SUNDAY

‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ It is an incredibly familiar formula. We use it at the beginning of every Mass; we use it whenever we pray. In fact it is so familiar that when we say those words we are usually on automatic pilot. We hardly give them a thought. And yet they summarise what essentially distinguishes the Christian religion from other faiths. We believe God is One. So do Jews; so do Muslims. But within that one-ness of God, God has been revealed to us in three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
 
This understanding of God as One and yet Holy Trinity is sometimes presented as if it were a sort of mathematical conundrum. St Patrick is said to have used the shamrock leaf in order to explain it. You may have noticed the logo on the newsletter in recent weeks. It is the logo of the Thames Isis Pastoral Area, including Abingdon, where St Edmund, the patron saint of our diocese, was born. The form of the logo is adapted from the three interlocking circles which St Edmund of Abingdon used to help people understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
 
Such diagrams may have their uses. But they hardly bring the truth of God as Holy Trinity to life. Why do we have to bother with such complications, when it is much simpler to believe simply in One God?
We need to be able to see that the understanding and worship of God as Holy Trinity underpins all our prayer and all our life as Christians.
 
In today’s Mass, the Scripture reading which is most helpful in this respect is the Second Reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. And it begins not with God the Father, but with the Holy Spirit. ‘Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son (or daughter) of God’. And if we are to understand how the Holy Trinity underpins all our life as Christians, this is indeed where we need to start. Think for a moment about prayer. I wonder what you do when you come to pray? I was taught to kneel down by my bed. We now know that kneeling isn’t the only posture for prayer, although it is still a good one. The wonder and majesty of God should bring us to our knees. If you sit, as I usually do, we still need to begin by reminding ourselves quietly about the presence of God. And as I mentioned at the beginning, we probably begin with the sign of the Cross, and saying ‘In the name of the Father…’
 
All that is good. But if you are one of those people who say Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church, you will know that this official form of prayer doesn’t begin quite like that. It begins, ‘O God, come to our aid. O Lord, make haste to help us’.  The official prayer of the Church begins by saying ‘Please God, help me’. It begins by acknowledging that I can’t even begin to pray unless God the Holy Spirit helps me. If I have a desire to pray, as we sometimes do, it is because God the Holy Spirit is there first, nudging me in the direction of opening myself up to God. If I think, as we all do sometimes, that I’ll skip prayer today; I’ll skip prayer because I am too tired or too busy to bother with God or to thank God; if I find myself thinking like that, it is God the Holy Spirit who nudges us in the face of this temptation and gives us a right sense of priorities and the will to act on them. ‘Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son or daughter of God.’ If we act as we should as children of God, it is because God the Holy Spirit is there first, and is on our side. In the same chapter, St Paul has these wonderfully encouraging words about our prayer. We all feel pretty bad at it. We try to keep going, but we feel pretty feeble. St Paul writes: ‘The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness, for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words…’. When we pray, and not only when we pray, God is not only above us, beyond us, majestically distant from us. God is also on our side.
 
In our Baptism, in our Confirmation, through our membership of the Church, we have received the Holy Spirit. As sons and daughters of God, God is on our side. And, says St Paul, the natural cry of the Holy Spirit within us - the Spirit we have received in our Baptism and Confirmation – is the cry ‘Abba, Father’. Why is that the natural cry of the Holy Spirit within us? We shall be answering that question for ourselves in a few moments. We shall say the Creed. We will be confessing our belief in God the Holy Spirit ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son.’ It was the Holy Spirit who was revealed at the Baptism of Jesus as the bond between the Father and the Son. The same Holy Spirit, given to us through the sacraments of the Church, is the bond between us and Jesus the Son. The Holy Spirit is not only the Spirit of the Father, but also, at the same time and always, the Spirit of the Son. The God who is on our side, the God the Holy Spirit who nudges us to open ourselves to God, always moves to place us with Jesus the Son. When we pray as Christians, we pray from a particular place. Moved by the Holy Spirit, we pray alongside Jesus the Son. We pray united with Jesus the Son. We pray not just as children of God in some general sense, but as sons and daughters adopted by God, to share the same ground as Jesus who is the beloved Son of the Father.
 
That is the place we are praying from when we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us – that prayer which has become not only a prayer in itself, but a pattern for all prayer. When as Christians we say ‘Our Father’ we are echoing that incredibly intimate ‘Abba, Father’ of Jesus himself. Again, the ‘Our Father’ is a prayer we often rattle off on automatic pilot. We’ll be saying it, of course, just before Holy Communion in this Mass – not, I hope, quite on automatic. But next time you say it on your own, just pause to remember that by saying it you are placing yourself within God the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit comes to your aid and places you with Jesus the Son, so that you may have the courage to speak to the Father; to speak to the Father with that same confidence and intimacy which Jesus revealed. And it does take courage. To be in that place reveals our need for God’s mercy; to be in that place challenges the whole way we live our lives.
 
In the light of today’s Second Reading, we have looked at personal prayer as involving us in the mystery of God the Holy Trinity. What is true of personal prayer is equally true of every Mass. As I have often pointed out, the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer sums up the whole of what we are doing when we come to Mass. But Mass and personal prayer are not strange activities disconnected from the rest of life. They provide us with a framework of meaning within which the whole of our life is meant to be lived. And that fundamental meaning is provided by St Paul in the conclusion of today’s short passage: ‘If we are children then we are heirs as well: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings so as to share his glory.’ Through the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ we all live with the hope of glory, even if it is a glory at present shrouded in mystery.  But when St Paul speaks here of the sufferings of Christ, we should not limit this to his Passion. That was the terrible yet glorious end to a whole life with all its ups and downs  surrendered to the Father. The Holy Spirit places us with Christ before the Father in our prayer. We are placed there at Mass and in our prayer so that all the circumstances of our life may be lived from that place and from that perspective. What we celebrate on this solemn feast is no mathematical formula or theological conundrum. It is the glorious context of every moment of our daily lives.  

PENTECOST with Baptism & 1st Communion (2009)

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, the day when we celebrate the coming of God’s Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Jesus; that dramatic coming in wind and fire which we heard about in the First Reading. But let’s go back a bit. At Christmas we celebrated the birth of Jesus. In January we celebrated his Baptism; his baptism by John the Baptist in the river Jordan when he has about thirty. Not four, like A, or nearly nine, like M, but thirty. At his baptism the Holy Spirit came down upon him in the form of a dove, revealing his link with God the Father. Jesus was shown at his baptism to be the beloved Son of our Father in heaven.
 
  Now when M and A are baptised in a few moments, there probably won’t be any dramatic signs. Apart, that is, from water being poured over them, which is dramatic in its way. We can’t be sure; God is a God of surprises. Sometimes God’s Holy Spirit comes very dramatically, but more often than not, God’s Holy Spirit comes very gently and silently. Like a drop of water on a sponge. But God’s Holy Spirit will come for A and M. That is certain. It is certain because that is what Jesus has promised. At the Baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit came, showing the link of love by which Jesus was absolutely one with his heavenly Father. At the baptism of M and A the Holy Spirit comes to link them once and for all to Jesus and his Church – Jesus the Head, now risen and ascended into heaven, and his Church, his Body on earth.
 
   At Christmas we celebrated the birth of Jesus. In January we celebrated his Baptism. After that he gathered a little group of friends, the people who became his twelve Apostles. They stayed with him for three years as he went around preaching and teaching and healing – calling people to put God at the centre of their lives. A few weeks ago we celebrated Easter, and the events that led up to that. We celebrated the death of Jesus on the Cross, and his burial. Then there was Easter, and the empty tomb! Jesus had been killed, but he had been raised up to a new life beyond death. Death wasn’t the end. He even came back to be with his friends, his disciples, and to go on teaching them. Then last Sunday we celebrated his Ascension into heaven. Jesus had always been the beloved Son of his heavenly Father, and now he was returning to his Father in heaven. And of course his friends were devastated. He was the most wonderful person they had ever known, and now he was gone.
 
   His friends were devastated. At least until they remembered what he had said about his gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was not going to be with them quite as he had been before. But the gift of the Holy Spirit would make it possible for him to be with them in a new way; in fact in various new ways. And he would be with them wherever they were and for all time. He would be with all those who became his friends and followers ever afterwards – including us. Including M and her cousin S, and A as well.
 
  Through our baptism, the Holy Spirit links us to Jesus. That happened to S on 10th February, 2001, when he was six months old. It is happening to M and A today. But S and M are now old enough to receive Holy Communion. We don’t necessarily need to understand what is happening when we are baptised, as long as our parents and godparents do. But we do need to understand a bit what is happening when we receive Holy Communion, so we don’t do that until we are a bit older. I say ‘understand a bit’, because there isn’t anyone in this church who understands fully. If they did, they would probably be in heaven.
 
   If you listen carefully later to the prayer the priest says over the bread and wine – the prayer which consecrates them to be not bread and wine but the Body and Blood of Jesus - if you listen carefully, you will hear these words: ‘Father, we bring you these gifts’ (that’s the bread and wine). We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit, so that they may become the body and blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Those are very important words. Not quite as important as the words of Jesus himself a few moments later, but still very important. In fact, if the server remembers, he or she will ring the little bell to make sure we are awake and hear them.
 
  ‘We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit’. The same Holy Spirit who came in wind and fire at Pentecost comes at each Mass to make that ordinary bread and wine no longer bread and wine, but the special way that Jesus himself comes to be with us. Not only with us, but within us. Closer to us than our hands and our feet. At our baptism we put on Christ, we were wrapped round with Christ. In Holy Communion Jesus Christ himself comes to be within us, so that we can become more and more like him. And what happens as we become more like him is described in the Second Reading we heard from St Paul.
 
    Paul is especially important today, because he is one of M’s patron saints, as he is mine. Anyway, in that reading St Paul speaks of two things that are opposites: ‘self-indulgence’ – being selfish and greedy – and the gifts the Holy Spirit brings – Love, and patience and kindness. We have heard an awful lot recently about important people who ought to have known better being selfish and greedy. St Paul says that people who follow Jesus and are trying to stay close to him need to live in a different way. It isn’t always easy; we can’t do it on our own. But Jesus helps and strengthens us. He comes to us through our Baptism, and keeps us close to him through Holy Communion so that we can live in a way which is unselfish and honest and truthful; caring about others before ourselves.
 
   Our country used to be called a ‘Christian country’, because its laws and traditions were based on Jesus Christ. Mostly people seem to have forgotten that, but it is becoming obvious how important it is to rediscover it. How important it is to rediscover not just a way of life, but Jesus Christ, the person on whom that way of life was based.  M and S and A in Baptism and Holy Communion have joined us in seeking to base their lives on Jesus Christ. May they, and their parents and godparents, and all of us, be faithful in the future to what we are doing today. In the Gospel, Jesus calls us to be witnesses to him in the power of the Spirit. As we look around our country and our world today, nothing could be more important than that witness. May Jesus Christ who unites us to himself in Baptism, and shares his life with us in Holy Communion, keep us faithful in the future by the power of his Holy Spirit.

6th SUNDAY of EASTER, Year B (2009)

‘I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you, and your joy be complete.’ In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that the object of his teaching about the relationship of love into which God invites us is that we may share his joy. All that he tells us, says Jesus, he tells us so that our joy may be complete. So that we may be completely fulfilled in joy.
 
The poet Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about the death of his daughter Catherine. It is a grief-stricken poem, but it begins with the words ‘Surprised by joy’. Joy is indeed always a surprise. Joy is different from happiness. Happiness is something we can seek. Indeed seeking happiness has been, and remains, a major human preoccupation. Practically everything we do has this somewhere in the background. But joy is different. Joy cannot be deliberately sought. It is always something that just happens to us. It is always a surprise.
 
Wordsworth doesn’t tell us what was the immediate cause of his moment of joy. It may well have been some aspect of the world of nature. And it led him immediately into a reflection on the death of his daughter, because he wanted to share the experience, and she was no longer there. The poet moved rapidly from a moment of joy to an experience of sorrow. Joy, as we experience it, tends to be intense and of short duration. If we are lucky, we can talk about whole periods of our lives as happy. But not, generally, as joyful. There is more to ‘joy’ than a sense of life being generally good.
 
The context in which Jesus speaks of joy in the Gospel is the context of being embraced and held in the love of God. One of the commonest contexts for the experience of joy must surely be the context of human love. But there are many others as well. I have once or twice had the experience while listening to music of being totally taken into it; ‘I am the music while the music lasts.’ One aspect of joy is that it seems to involve some sense of oneness – of unity with a person, or the world of nature, or with what my senses perceive. I believe it can also be experienced in the world of sport. I may be surprised by joy when eye and mind and limbs are so perfectly united and co-ordinated that the ball does exactly what I intend. And it isn’t necessarily about scoring a goal or winning a point; it is simply about being completely together – every part of me fulfilling its function in harmony.
 
In the Gospel, Jesus speaks about joy in the context of God’s love, but also in the context of ‘keeping the Father’s commandments.’ These days we don’t like the idea of commandments. Nobody wants to live under the burden of externally imposed rules. We want to be free; we want to be ourselves and express ourselves freely. What Jesus says only makes sense if in fact the commandments of God are guidelines for discovering my true freedom. They are not a straightjacket, but an invitation to discover the fullness of the unique person God has created me to be. To keep God’s commandments, to be open to God’s will, is to be on the path to that unification of all my faculties, that sense of unity with others and with all creation, which I experience momentarily when I am ‘surprised by joy’.
 
As Christians, we are not called to be happy all the time. Blessed, indeed, in the midst of this world, are those who mourn. But we are invited to keep our eyes on Jesus. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that for the sake of the joy which lay ahead, he endured the Cross. Those moments, rare as they may be, when we are ‘surprised by joy’ are a great blessing. But they are more than that, because they are pointers to our deepest reality and to our final destiny. We are created to be the friends of God, and to remain for ever in his love. We are created for the fullness of joy.

4th SUNDAY of EASTER, Year B (2009)

Today we are to pray for Vocations. We are praying for more priests. We would like more deacons, too, of course, and surely more nuns as well. But if we think that ideally we ought to have nine priests in our Pastoral Area and not just three (as the Leadership Team decided recently), it is vocations to the priesthood we need to be praying for above all.

As people often remind me, (and I quite agree with them), I have been extraordinarily fortunate. I am often told that I have ‘the best of both worlds’. I have a wonderful wife and a lovely family, and at the request of the present Pope Benedict, on June 6th 1994 Pope John Paul II gave Bishop Crispian permission to ordain me to the priesthood. I had many years of happy ministry in the Church of England, although latterly they were marred by the growing sense that I needed to be in communion with the Catholic Church. I have now had fourteen even happier years of ministry within the Catholic Church.

There is no absolute theological bar to the ordination of married men. That is certainly true. It may ultimately appear that there is no theological bar to the ordination of women, although at present that is, at the very least, not clear. Some people think that if only these two issues could be resolved positively, the problem of vocations to the priesthood would be solved. I think that this is a blind alley. Certainly neither of these issues is going to be resolved rapidly. And I am pretty sure that the real issue about the lack of vocations lies elsewhere.

It lies partly in the lack of encouragement. We may pray for vocations to the priesthood, but my guess is that many of us are praying that God will call somebody else’s sons or somebody else’s grandsons. In worldly terms at least, the prospects of those in the priesthood are not great. Clergy, once socially respected, are now even sometimes despised and rejected. We don’t want that for our nearest and dearest. Despised and rejected, they would be in good company, but, understandably, we still don’t want it for them. And then there is loneliness. And then there is the all-consuming nature of the life. It is, after all, a life, not a job. And it is a life for life, as well. But that, in fact, is one of the joys. Who really wants a life in which you are constantly looking forward to retirement? Many are in that position, but it is hardly enviable. And even when a priest does retire, he doesn’t cease to be a priest. Life doesn’t suddenly end, it just changes. And that is a blessing.

My own experience, in fact, has been that I simply couldn’t imagine a life more rich and varied and fulfilling. Sometimes there is a bit much of it; it would be good to have more hours in the day and days in the week. Keeping the essential time for prayer is almost as hard for a priest as it is for anyone else. And there are a number of ways in which I have a much easier life than most. I don’t have to worry about housing, and I am surrounded by a hugely supportive and caring community. Simply at the worldly level, it isn’t a bad life; far from it.

But if you keep your thinking at the worldly level, this Sunday, Good Shepherd Sunday, presents a pretty big challenge. This Sunday, when we hear the Gospel of the Good Shepherd, has surely been chosen as a Day of Prayer for Vocations in general, because it highlights the pastoral vocation and therefore essentially the priestly vocation. It highlights the vocation to be conformed to the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.

There is a hugely important sense, of course, in which every Christian, as well as priests, deacons and religious, is called to be conformed to Christ. That must never be forgotten, and indeed all pastoral ministry is in the service of that universal call. Every Christian is called to holiness, called to put on Christ. And called to do so in the context of their ordinary life in this world, with all its absorbing and confusing attractions and distractions.

It was within this same world that Jesus the Good Shepherd lived out his particular incarnate vocation. He too, we suppose, had to earn a living, at least for a few years. He too had to face all sorts of challenges, religious and secular. But for him, the absolutely guiding principle throughout was that he had to ‘be about his Father’s business’. His initial task, which he shared with his disciples, was to proclaim the nearness of the Kingdom of God. It was to enlarge people’s vision so that they could really grasp the true context in which their earthly lives were being lived. The call of a priest is surely to share in this particular ministry of the Good Shepherd. It is to be a sign, however personally faltering and unworthy, indeed to be a sacramental sign, of the presence of Jesus the Good Shepherd who constantly points us beyond our immediate preoccupations in this world to what our human life and our human community is ultimately all about.

As I read over, a few days ago, the three Scripture passages for this Sunday, three texts immediately struck me. The first was from the Second Reading: ‘Think of the love the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God’s children’. That is the starting point. That status which we almost take for granted is the outcome of God’s lavish love. But where does it lead? ‘The future has not yet been revealed. All we know is, we shall be like God, for we shall see God as he really is.’ The context of our ordinary lives is that God in lavish love, in more than lavish love, has created us to see God as God really is. That is the love vision to which a priest exists to bear witness. And if that really is the amazing truth, and if that is how God is calling me, then surely it is worth giving one’s life to that call. What could be more wonderful or more worthwhile?

And linked to that I was struck by the final words of the First Reading from Acts. ‘Of all the names in the world, this – the name of Jesus – this is the only one by which we can be saved.’ It is Jesus the Good Shepherd who has taken our redeemed humanity into the love and life of God. Through Him and through him alone can we be enfolded in that love. Through Him and through him alone all humanity is redeemed – whether or not we consciously at present belong to his fold. ‘Other sheep I have…them also I must bring.’ If indeed Jesus is the Redeemer of the World – if that is the ultimate religious truth, as it surely is – then for that too it is worth giving one’s life.

And finally, and most challenging of all, the text with which I began. ‘The good shepherd is one who lays down his life for his sheep.’ In order that we could come ultimately to the vision of God; in order that the Kingdom of God might come, the Good Shepherd had to lay down his life. He had to be ready to give up life in this world in trust that the Father’s love would not abandon him. Jesus himself gave his disciples the means to remember that sacrifice and its triumphant outcome in the mystery of the Eucharist. At the altar, the priest stands for Jesus. It is the sacrifice of Jesus into which we are taken up, not our own. He is himself the true and only priest. But the one ordained to stand at the altar as a sacramental sign of Christ cannot escape hearing those Gospel words addressed to him: ‘The good shepherd is one who lays down his life for his sheep.’ He must hear them in the context of Easter faith; he must hear them in utter reliance on God’s grace. For who indeed is sufficient for these things? And almost inevitably overcome with a sense both of unworthiness and of frailty, he must also surely hear the word of the Lord to St Paul, addressed to him when he was in great distress: ‘My strength is made perfect in weakness’.

2nd SUNDAY of EASTER, Year B (2009)

It is striking that, this year at least, the Gospels for Easter Sunday itself do not include any encounter with the risen Jesus. At the Vigil, the First Mass of Easter, we were left with the women who were terrified at the discovery of the empty tomb. In the morning we had St John’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb by Peter and John. Peter, typically, blunders into it; John waits at the entrance. And, we are told, ‘he saw and believed’. Even without meeting the risen Lord, John got the message. But still no actual meeting with the risen Lord. The emphasis is all on the fact that the tomb was empty. As far as the Sunday Gospel readings go, we have to wait for this Sunday actually to encounter the risen Christ. And a major emphasis of today’s Gospel is that He really is risen. He is not a ghost. ‘He showed them his hands and his side.’ He is the same one who suffered the nails and spear. And as if that wasn’t enough, we have the account of doubting Thomas to underline it. ‘Just seeing the wounds isn’t enough; I’ve got to touch them.’ However hard it may be for us to understand, the emphasis is on two things: continuity – ‘I really am the same person’, and bodiliness. Last Sunday, the tomb was empty; the total being of Jesus had been translated to a new plane, a new dimension. And today, ‘yes, you can touch me’ – bodiliness; and ‘touch my wounds’ – continuity. I’m the same person who suffered and died.

I have just referred to the resurrection of Jesus in terms of translation to a new plane or a new dimension. In doing that I feel both easy and uneasy. I feel easy, because ‘new planes’ and ‘other dimensions’ are becoming more familiar categories. They may be mysterious; we don’t quite know what we are talking about. But they do feature in the popular imagination. The example of which I am most aware is Philip Pullman’s trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. But I think there are other examples. But I feel uneasy talking in these terms, too. Because however we try to get some kind of imaginative hold on it, the resurrection of Jesus will always remain an unique mystery. By its very nature it must burst out of any categories in which we try to confine it. Jesus told a parable about new wine bursting old wineskins. That parable surely needs to be at the back of our minds as we struggle to get some sort of imaginative grip on the mystery of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is in absolute continuity with the life and passion and death of Jesus. But it is also absolutely ‘new wine’.

This too is emphasised in today’s Gospel. For in it, as well as all that emphasis on bodiliness and continuity, we have a sort of anticipation of Pentecost. Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them the Holy Spirit. He gives them the Holy Spirit and sends them out in the power of the Holy Spirit. He sends them out to continue the mission which the Father had entrusted to his Son, to Jesus himself. You probably remember the account of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles – all that wind and fire, and then all the disciples speaking in tongues, so that the message is understood by people from all over the known world. Most people are hugely impressed. But of course there are also the cynics. But, as elsewhere in Scripture, even the cynics manage to bear witness to the truth despite themselves. What they say is, ‘these men are drunk with new wine.’ And so indeed they are. They are drunk with the new wine of the Kingdom of God.

I think that this is where that little First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles fits in. ‘The whole group of believers were united heart and soul.’ It is a little idealised picture of the very early Christian community. It was all absolutely perfect. Everyone shared everything. What communism at its best dreamed of, the first Christians briefly achieved. But as we hear that today, it is we, I suspect, who are the tired cynics. ‘It was all very well for them’, we think. ‘They expected Jesus to return any moment and bring the world as they knew it to an end. And anyway there weren’t that many of them, so it was all pretty simple.’ And indeed you can see it getting more complicated just a few pages further on in the Acts of the Apostles. But the fundamental point is surely that these people are ‘drunk with new wine.’ It isn’t just that they are a bunch of idealists who have set up a commune. It is that they have drunk the new wine of the Kingdom of God; the new wine which is made available by the death and resurrection of Jesus and by his sharing of the Holy Spirit.

From the moment of the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit was seen to be the bond which united him to his Father. As a result of the resurrection of Jesus that same Holy Spirit of God is made available to the disciples. And it is not only made available to those disciples in the Gospel. It is made available to us. Those in our community who are preparing to receive the sacrament of Confirmation are preparing to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit of love which unites Jesus to his Father. This is the new wine which we have all imbibed. This is the love which is the deepest dimension of our lives. This is the plane on which we are called to live. And it isn’t that we have got somehow to struggle up to it. It is a gift – a gift from the risen Lord. ‘He breathed on them, and said: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ Our faith is not first about struggle and striving; it is first of all about grace – about gift.

That anticipation of Pentecost in today’s Gospel has been seen as a key text for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is a basis for the practice of Confession and Absolution. The Church continues the mission of her risen Lord in the power of his Spirit. But it is surely wider than that as well. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a particular and individual focussing of a ministry of reconciliation which is the central mission of the Church. It is the central mission of the Church because it is the central mission of Christ. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’.

‘The whole group of believers were united, heart and soul.’ That is what God has made us for. Reconciliation with God; reconciliation with each other. That is what God has made us for, but our actual human experience is very different. Our world is riddled at every level with conflict – conflicts which on our own we seem powerless to resolve. Into the midst of this comes the risen Jesus, the one who has taken on the mission of reconciliation given by his Father at his baptism, and who has entered the heart of the conflict on the Cross. He has entered the heart of the conflict, and has revealed the victory of suffering love. He has revealed the victory by the reality of his resurrection. The risen body of Christ is the indestructible place where God’s Kingdom of peace and reconciliation is established. It is to that we are united by our baptism into his Body. It is to that we are united by our receiving of the gift of his Spirit. It is to that we are united by our continued nourishment by his life-blood in the Eucharist, by the new wine of the Kingdom. Nourished by these gifts of grace, this is now the deepest truth of our lives.

So we have two tasks. And the second I utterly dependent on the first. Our first task is to remain securely rooted in that mysterious dimension of the risen Body of Christ in faith and love. Our second task is to be in every possible way and at every level ministers of reconciliation. ‘He said to them again, ‘Peace be with you’. As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.’

Easter Vigil 2009:

‘They said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid.’ So ends tonight’s Gospel in my Missal. You didn’t hear those words because the big Lectionary seems to have left them out. But so our proclamation of the Gospel for this evening should have ended. And so ends, probably, the Gospel according to St Mark, which we are reading this year. What comes after, most agree, is cobbled together from other sources. What the Gospel tells us is that the first witnesses of the empty tomb were struck dumb with terror.

Fear comes in a number of guises. The fear we hear a good deal about at this season is fear of the power of human institutions. ‘What will happen to me if they discover I’m a follower of Jesus, too?’ That was the fear which led Peter to denial. ‘If they’ve got him, next they may come and get us.’ That was the fear that kept the disciples locked in that upper room. But the fear of the women at the tomb was different. It was, surely, fear in the face of an experience which simply didn’t fit in to their existing framework of understanding. Fear in the face of an experience which was quite literally shattering.

Tonight we began, as is traditional, with the New Fire and the Light of Christ. We began with the New Creation in Christ, and the Easter Proclamation. But then we went back to start. The Vigil Service proper – the service of readings – begins at the beginning. It begins with the first Genesis account of the Creation of the world. I found myself in conversation the other day with someone who might perhaps be described as a baptised agnostic. Generally sympathetic to Christianity, but pretty much in tune with contemporary culture. She said to me, in a tone of real astonishment, ‘You don’t really believe that the world was created by God, do you?’ As you may imagine, I was equally astonished that she could suppose that I did not. But it turned out, of course, that she assumed that this meant I was a ‘Creationist’. She assumed - as is so often assumed in these days, even in intelligent circles- she assumed that to believe that the world is created is to deny any process of evolution; that to believe in God’s creation is to accept that God made the world in six days, taking literally the Genesis account.

The real issue, of course, is not between six days or billions of years. The real issue is surely different. It is this. Is it matter and chance which are fundamental; matter and chance, which happen eventually to have thrown up these human creatures who dream such strange dreams? Or do these strange dreams have their origin in a Creator God, whose image, in some sense, human beings have come to reflect? It is this view that Genesis affirms. Partly, it is a comforting view. But partly, perhaps, it is not. Most of the time we are comfortable within our material world. It is familiar. We know how to cope with it. The women who had prepared spices to anoint the body of Jesus were devastated by his death, but they knew what they were about. They were at home in the well-known rituals of mourning. They were on secure ground. They were on secure ground, and suddenly this great void opened up beneath them. Where they had expected to find a body, there was nothing. The tomb was empty. They were terrified. The universe they knew had suddenly expanded far beyond their comprehension. What could it mean?

To believe in a Creator God you do not have to be a ‘creationist’. You do not have to take that wonderful Genesis poem of creation as a piece of historical or scientific truth. But I have been particularly struck this year by the way in which this Holy Week in which we solemnly celebrate the passion, death and resurrection of Christ echoes that original Week of Creation. It was on the sixth day that God finished his work of creation. And it is on the sixth day, on Good Friday, that Jesus on the cross utters that agonising and yet triumphal cry: ‘It is finished’. We heard it yesterday – the crowning moment in St John’s account of the Passion. God finished his original work of creation on the sixth day, and on the seventh day he rested. Jesus finished his great work of redemption on the sixth day, and on the seventh day he rested. He rested in the sleep of death. He rested in the tomb. And very early in the morning on the first day of the new week, the women went to the tomb – and found it empty.

They were terrified. For they could not possibly know then that this great void which had opened up for them was in fact the way through to God’s New Creation. The material world which appears to us much of the time as a closed system was in fact revealed through these events to be open to the mystery of God. This empty tomb which for those women at that moment was a void which simply reinforced their sense of utter darkness and desolation – this empty tomb was in fact the space through which the light of God’s unconquerable love would be revealed. ‘He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see him.’ They may have heard the words, but they surely did not at that moment get the message. For that they would need the personal encounter with the risen Lord, and the gift of his Peace, to allay their terror.

The world in which we live has much that is wonderful about it; it is, after all, God’s good creation. But considered as a closed system, whether at the human or the natural level, it has much to terrify us. Tonight baby Amelie is to be baptised. A new life such as hers is both a delight and an unique marvel. But we, like many generations of human beings before us, must also sometimes fear for what may lie ahead for such a young life. The world as a closed system may seem dark; a world open to the mystery of God may also initially inspire terror. It was perhaps in the light of both sources of fear that Jesus so frequently told his disciples not to be afraid. But he has done more than simply tell us not to be afraid. The event which we celebrate tonight, the death and resurrection of the Lord with which we link Amelie through baptism tonight – it is this event which demonstrates that we have no need to fear; this event which sustains us and gives us courage even if our human hearts quail.

For we celebrate the Prince of life who died, yet lives to reign; we celebrate the One who by confronting the forces of evil with no other weapons than love is the Redeemer of the world, leading it into the New Creation; we celebrate the One who reveals to us that the heart of the mystery of God, which can seem so terrifying, is a love which is prepared to come down to our level, to share our weakness, our pain and even our death; a love which from which nothing can separate us; a love which invites us, in union with the risen Christ, into a fulfilment of life and glory beyond all our imagining.

HOLY THURSDAY 2009

In a moment we will come to the ceremony of the Washing of the Feet. ‘Ceremony’ is perhaps not a very good word for it. Of all the ceremonies that form part of the Church’s liturgy, it is probably the least ceremonious.
I sometimes admire the feet, the wonderfully straight toes, of people who seem to have lived their whole lives in open-toed sandals. But most of us have lived our lives in relatively ill-fitting shoes, and our feet have paid the price. Mine, certainly, are a complete mess. To offer a foot to be washed on this occasion is to become vulnerable in a way we would not always wish to be. And although I don’t have to take my shoes off, there is some vulnerability on my side, too. More or less crawling along the floor looks pretty idiotic, and the towel round my waist is always slipping off. And yet it is a powerful symbol of loving service. On both sides. ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.’ ‘Where there is love and loving kindness, God is there.’ It is in those moments when we are not closed up in our dignity and pride, but when we are really open to each other, when we are vulnerable – it is in those moments that we almost instinctively recognise the presence of God.

The washing of the feet is an intimate moment in this liturgy. But the whole of this Mass of the Lord’s Supper has something of an intimate character. We are gathered with our Lord, as the disciples gathered, for this family celebration of the Passover. The Jewish Passover celebration of which the First Reading reminded us, the Jewish Passover celebration which lies behind the celebration of every Mass, is itself a family affair. And we don’t need to be reminded that the Mass, for us as Catholics is ‘our thing’. We are in fact constantly reminded of this, not least in the Bishop’s Pastoral Plan. Sunday Mass is central. This is almost what defines us as Catholics. This is the particular way in which we come close, and by which we keep close, to our Lord. And here we are celebrating the night on which this particular gift was given to the Church. As St Paul says to us in the Second Reading: ‘This is what I received from the Lord, and in turn pass on to you’. It was a defining action for the Church then, and it still is, two thousand years on.

The Lord still gives himself to us in the gift of his Body and Blood. He still comes to us when we gather as a Body, and comes to us individually within that Body. Through the gift of Himself he unites us to Himself. He unites us to himself, he comes to dwell within us, in an intimate union. It is an extraordinary mystery, an amazing gift.

That is, at least in part, what we are celebrating this evening. But it is very far from being the whole story. We always have a hymn instead of the Entrance Antiphon of the Mass, so we never hear it. But the Entrance Antiphon for this Mass of the Lord’s Supper begins ‘We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation.’ And this is picked up in the Second Reading. ‘Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming the Lord’s death.’ Much as we might in some ways like to, we must not separate the Eucharist as communion from the Eucharist as proclamation of the Lord’s death. We must not separate this intimate family celebration, this love-feast, from the stark events which belong to tomorrow – to Good Friday. As the Church constantly emphasises, this three-day celebration is in fact a unity. Even if we can’t come to all its parts, it is still one celebration.

As you will be aware, the Mass this evening ends with the Watch of Prayer until midnight. It is a shame that so few people actually come back later in the evening to take part in this – although that is very understandable. It is a shame because it is a wonderful time of stillness in which to meditate quietly on the meaning of these days. But it is also a time in which these two elements – the Passion of the Lord and our intimate communion with him – are brought together. The Lord is present sacramentally in the tabernacle on the Altar of Repose; that presence of the risen Lord who gives himself to us in Holy Communion is honoured with candles and flowers. But at the same time it is the Watch of Gethsemane; we seek to be with our Lord as he struggles with his real humanity which naturally shrinks from the path of suffering. ‘Let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, Father, not my will, but yours be done.’

As the Psalm reminded us, the cup from which Jesus in his humanity shrinks – that cup is ‘the cup of salvation’. What is at stake is not just something which concerns our little family; it is something which involves the whole world – indeed the whole universe. I have been very struck this year by a verse from the ancient hymn which is part of the Office for Holy Week, and which can be sung during the Veneration of the Cross tomorrow:
‘He endured the nails, the spitting,
Vinegar and spear and reed;
From that holy body broken
Blood and water forth proceed:
Earth and stars, and sky and ocean
By that flood from stain are freed.’
The event to which we are linked by the celebration of the Eucharist – the Passion and death of the Lord – is an event which not only affects the whole of humanity, whether people are aware of it or not. It is an event which affects the whole universe. ‘Earth and stars and sky and ocean’. That may seem far-fetched, until we hear again the words of the Gospel. Jesus is about to wash the feet of his disciples. He is about to engage in this symbolic act of humble loving service. But that action is given an extraordinary context. ‘Jesus knew that the Father had put everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.’ He had come from the Creator of the whole Universe, and he was returning to the Creator of the whole universe. The Cross of Jesus stands at the heart not only of the salvation of humanity, but also of the salvation of all creation.

We are very aware these days of the threats to humanity which confront us because of human sinfulness – the greed, the violence, the exploitation, the terror. But lurking behind all these we are increasingly aware of the threat of catastrophic change to our environment. Changes to earth and stars and sky and ocean which could render much of our world, possibly all of it, uninhabitable. It is a terrifying prospect. But it also a set of circumstances which is not beyond the reach of the one who comes from God and is going to God. The arms of the Cross embrace even those eventualities. The one who for us has taken the form of a slave is also the one whose name is above all other names; the one who is Master and Lord, and Universal King.

We began from the intimacy of foot-washing, and it is there that we end. This family Passover celebration unites us to the one who can rightly claim equality with God; the one whose love, made visible supremely on the Cross, embraces the whole universe. He invites us to communion with himself – he offers us his Body and Blood. For, as he tells us, apart from him we can do nothing. But with him, we are called to follow his example. We are not called to put the world to rights at a stroke. That is not how things work. We are called to wash each other’s feet. We are called to serve our fellow beings in humility and love wherever we are; to care for our environment in whatever way we can. And it will be in these small things, in communion with, and dependent on, the one who comes from God and is going to God – it will be in the intimacy of these small things that we will contribute to the coming of God’s Kingdom.

LINKS TO PREVIOUS HOMILIES:

http://www.communigate.co.uk/oxford/hinkseycatholicparish/page10.phtml

http://www.communigate.co.uk/oxford/hinkseycatholicparish/page18.phtml