Homilies

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6th SUNDAY of EASTER (Year B) –2012

‘What I command you is to love one another’. We hear those familiar words this week against a background of continuing political argument about how to deal with the debt crisis – argument in the context of the French presidential election, in the context of the election in Greece, in this country in the context of the State Opening of Parliament. Should it be growth? Should it be austerity? Can the Greeks stand any more austerity? What about the people who in our own country are apparently simply having to increase their personal debt in order to feed themselves and their families? Commentators say there isn’t much room for manoeuvre, whichever side of the argument you take. For me, and perhaps for many of us, life goes on much as before; the direct impact has not been felt – not yet, at least. But they say the austerity has only just begun.  And if you have lost your job; if you have had your welfare benefits cut; if you are looking for a job and can’t find one, it must, to say the least, already be a hard and dispiriting time. Against that background we hear the words of Jesus in the Gospel, ‘love one another’.
 
As I was thinking about these words in the context of the debt crisis, my mind strayed to a parable of Jesus which suddenly seemed only too relevant – the parable of the unforgiving debtor. The one who owed his master a huge sum which he couldn’t possibly pay back, and was himself owed some paltry little sum. It isn’t easy to know exactly who we are in debt to, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if they all heard the parable of Jesus and realised that the right thing to do would be simply to forgive the debt. Then we could all make a new start, learning of course, from our previous mistakes – learning the simple lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that we must live according to our much reduced means. Unfortunately, the economic web is too complex for that to be possible, even if the goodwill were there. And in any case, collectively, under those circumstances would we really repent, or just take advantage? The fact is, we are going to have to live with the mess we have made.
 
But in the parable, Jesus is not suggesting an economic policy, he is telling us about the nature of God. He is telling us about the God who is love; he is telling us about the God whose love is supremely expressed in forgiveness of a debt which it is quite impossible for the human race collectively to pay.  That parable in fact illustrates exactly what St John is saying in the Second Reading, when he speaks of God’s love being revealed in the Son. ‘God is love’ – it is such an easy thing to say; it can even seem a bland thing to say. But when St John says ‘God is love’ he isn’t being soft or bland, he is referring to the love which is shown supremely in the Son who is himself ‘the sacrifice that takes our sins away’. That is, in itself, such a difficult phrase to understand. The word St John uses for ‘sacrifice’ is a word which is all about reconciliation. Jesus himself, and supremely Jesus on the Cross, is the place where the separation between God and humanity is overcome. Jesus is the person in whom that reconciliation happens. And the Cross is the place where it happens. That is where God’s love is revealed. God’s love is the sort of love which is prepared to come down into the lowest pit of degradation into which humanity has sunk. God is willing, freely and out of pure love, to be crucified between two thieves on a rubbish dump. ‘Love one another’, says Jesus to his friends. But he went further than that. ‘Love your enemies, that you may be children of your Father in heaven’, says Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. And he, the true child of the Father, the Son of the Father, does just that. He loved his enemies, and he loved them to the end. That is the model on which our understanding of love is to be based. ‘This is the love I mean’, says St John, ‘not our love for God, but God’s love for us’. That is where we start from.
 
You may remember that at the very beginning of his Pontificate, Pope Benedict wrote an encyclical letter entitled ‘Deus Caritas Est’ – ‘God is Love’. It was short, but it revealed the man some of us had come to think of as ‘God’s Rotweiler’ in his true colours – the colours he exhibited in his very gracious visit to this country nearly two years ago. Pope Benedict begins by looking at the different sorts of love. He speaks of the love based on desire and longing for something or someone, which is dominant in our culture. He speaks of what sometimes seems almost its opposite -  the love which expresses itself in self-giving. And he points out that both are good and human. The love based on desire not only stimulates the journey towards marriage, it also stimulates the search for God. So the Psalmist sings: ‘Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God’. But the love which begins like that, whether in human relationships or in our relationship with God, has to mature. It has to learn the discipline of the love which not only desires, but also gives; the love which seeks above all things the good of the other, the good of the beloved. That is the part of the journey of love which many have forgotten in our culture, but it is also the part of the journey in which we can be ‘surprised by joy’ – the joy of which Jesus speaks in the Gospel. The joy comes, not when we are looking for it, but when we are seeking the good of the other person.
 
‘Love one another, as I have loved you’ says Jesus in the Gospel. In the same encyclical, the Holy Father is very clear about the inseparable nature of the two great commandments – love of God and love of neighbour. If out of supposed devotion to God we neglect our neighbour, our love of God will wither; if we love our neighbour but without reliance on God, without taking care to nurture a life of prayer, without the life and hope that God gives, we will be in danger of burn-out, or arrogance, or despair.
 
‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ Both St John’s letter and his Gospel seem to speak of love in a close community of faith. Indeed love has to be learnt, and is often most difficult, within family or close community. Loving the world in general is easy by comparison. But in the end, for us as followers of Jesus Christ, there is no escape from seeking the good of the whole human race. That is the revelation proclaimed by St Peter in the First Reading, and echoed in the Psalm: ‘All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.’ Reviewing Europe in crisis, I can sense the desire to batten down the hatches and pretend that those who are suffering have nothing to do with me. It is partly pure selfishness. It is partly self-defence, for the whole thing risks becoming overwhelming. That is, of course, true also of every humanitarian disaster which engulfs our world. In this context Pope Benedict ends his encyclical with some wonderful words. He  first recalls the forsaken cry of Jesus on the Cross. Then he continues, ‘Christians, even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Titus 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakeably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.”

5th SUNDAY of EASTER, Year B (2012)

As I was beginning to think about a homily for this Sunday, I dusted off an old commentary on today’s Second Reading from the First Letter of St John. I really did have to dust it off; it certainly hadn’t been off the shelf this century, and it was itself nearly a hundred years old.  The author drew attention to a general feature of the writings of St John -  the tendency to see things in black and white. In relation to the Church community, you were either ‘in’ or ‘out’. There were no half measures. Writing nearly a century ago, the author pointed out how difficult this was to relate to the conditions of his own day, when practically everyone was at least nominally Christian. It made me realise what a huge change can take place over a relatively short period of time.
 
Admittedly, he was writing from the perspective of the established church. From a Catholic perspective at that time, things might have looked rather different, at least in this country. Then, to be Catholic almost inevitably implied real commitment; today, rather like the established church then, there may well be more ‘fringe’ Catholics than there are those who regularly practice. However, I think we are all aware of a very different atmosphere. No longer is there an assumption about Christianity being a kind of default position in society. We are having to fight for things which once would have been totally non-controversial. To take two current examples: the legal battle about wearing a cross when at work; and having to defend the traditional understanding, and indeed the very meaning, of marriage. Today we are in a position much closer to that of the audience that St John was originally addressing. As Catholics, and indeed as Christians, we are having to stand out from the crowd; to become once again a distinctive group within society – a society into which we had been learning to merge, and within which we have become relatively invisible.
 
Two things, I suppose, used to distinguish Catholics from the rest of society. One was the attitude to Sunday worship. Unlike many people, they regarded Mass on Sunday as something which should not be missed even at the cost of considerable personal inconvenience. Today, for many, this priority has clearly slipped. They were also careful about abstaining from meat on Fridays. This discipline was deliberately relaxed some years ago now. Partly because this is something that other people notice, and partly as a sign of cohesion and belonging, our bishops have tried to re-introduce it. It has met with a mixed response.
 
But what really lies behind this desire, or pressure, to be distinctive? And is it really a matter of particular behaviour on Fridays or Sundays, good as these disciplines may be? It was St John who nudged me to ask this question, and not only in the context of today’s Second Reading, but even more strongly of the Gospel, with its extremely striking image of the vine.
 
Like so much in the Gospels, these words of Jesus echo a theme from the Old Testament Scriptures. As Isaiah (ch.5) says plainly, ‘the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel’. And Psalm 79 (80) laments its invasion and destruction and longs for its restoration.  It begins with rehearsing the story of the deliverance of God’s People from Egypt, a story which is particularly familiar to us through the Easter Vigil:
 
            ‘You brought a vine out of Egypt;
             To plant it you drove out the nations.
             Before it you cleared the ground;
             It took root and spread through the land….
 
The Psalmist then reflects on the disasters that followed arrival in the Promised Land; the conquest and exiles that were seen as a fruit of disobedience:
 
         Then why have you broken down its walls?
          It is plucked by all who pass by.
          It is ravaged by the boar of the forest,
          Devoured by the beasts of the field….
 
He then looks with longing and hope for a new era, a new world, a new creation:
 
       God of hosts, turn again, we implore…
         Visit your vine and protect it….
         The vine your right hand has planted.
         May your hand be on the man you have chosen,
        The man you have given your strength.
        And we shall never forsake you again…
 
‘May your hand be on the man you have chosen…and we shall never forsake you again.’  The Psalmist looks forward to a ‘chosen man’ who will bring about this new era. And now that ‘Chosen Man’ says to us in the Gospel, ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. I am the vine, you are the branches.’ It is a beautiful image of communion, and a powerful stimulus to individual devotion. I think that is how I have principally heard it for most of my life. Being an image of communion, it is also an image of the church; I may use it to reflect on my own personal relationship with Christ, but it will also take me in the direction of realising that as a disciple, as a branch of the vine linked to the stem, I cannot be on my own, I belong in the Church.
 
But there is much more to it than that. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is the one who has revealed the true nature of God to us, and indeed to the world. He is also the one who reveals to us what true humanity looks like. But he is also the true vine. He is, in himself, - he literally embodies - the restored and renewed People of God. It is in his person, crucified and risen, that the Kingdom of God is established. And this is a Kingdom which embraces not just Israel, but all the nations as well. This was already becoming clear in the Old Testament, and becomes totally clear in the New Testament; it becomes totally clear within the New Covenant which Jesus has established through the cross, the new and eternal Covenant in his blood.
 
I began by speaking of the tendency of St John in his writings to see things in black and white. You are either in or you are out. And I went on to ask how that might relate to Christians in our society. In some contexts we are virtually invisible; sometimes, and particularly in our own day, we seem to be called to be more distinctive – to stand out in contrast to our wider society. But what is the fundamental thing which distinguishes us within that wider society of which we are inevitably part? It isn’t fundamentally about particular behaviours on particular days. It is about our being part of the vine. It is this: that whatever defines your identity or mine within the terms of our world and our society, your fundamental identity and mine, our deepest, truest identity, is defined by being branches of the Vine. Our deepest identity is defined by being united to the risen Body of our crucified and risen Lord, Jesus Christ.
 
‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ said Jesus. He didn’t mean that therefore we should not engage with the world. We should, and we must. After all, we pray daily ‘Thy Kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.’ But we do so as people who are members of the Body of the Risen Christ, citizens of the New Jerusalem, elements of the New Creation. That is our true distinctiveness, to which every other distinction is secondary. It is a pretty amazing vocation, and I don’t feel up to it, any more than you probably do, when I really think about it. But I take some comfort too from St John – St John who sees that distinctiveness so clearly in black and white. For in that Second Reading it is St John who also says this ‘whatever accusations our conscience may raise against us, God is greater than our conscience and knows everything.’ Our final confidence must be confidence in the God who is Love, for, says Jesus, Jesus who is the True Vine, ‘cut off from me you can do nothing.’    

4th SUNDAY of EASTER, Year ‘B’

Good Shepherd Sunday is Vocations Sunday. It is a day of Prayer for Vocations to the Priesthood, the Diaconate and the Consecrated Life. Until the last year or two, there was a slightly desperate quality about this day. We were aware of the severe shortage of priests, and the apparent drying up of vocations to religious life; there was a great need for both, and prayer was dutifully made, but perhaps without much hope behind it. In the last year or two there has, I think, been a change of mood. In our diocese we now have eight men in seminary, and four more firmly headed that way. There are others at an earlier stage of discernment. Sister Catherine from Holy Trinity Monastery in East Hendred has mentioned to me women wanting to explore the possibility of joining, and other religious communities have experienced more enquiries recently. What is behind this? I think we can quite confidently and fundamentally answer ‘the Holy Spirit and prayer’, but there is also perhaps a bit more to be said.
 
There has been, over recent years, a process of reappraisal. There was a time when ‘vocations’ referred simply to priests and nuns. Then, more recently, we realised that every baptised Christian was called by God – every Christian had a vocation. So what was so special about priests and nuns? Now we have come through that, and realise that we do need to speak and pray specifically about those particular vocations, without losing sight of the truth that every Christian has a vocation.Everyone has a vocation, and God is calling some people to religious life; and God is calling some people to priesthood. And we need to pray, both for those people and for ourselves, that we will be open and listening, whatever God may be calling me to.
 
Pope Benedict has written an inspiring message for this day of prayer, starting from vocation as a response to the love of God – that love of God for each one of us which was there long before we were conscious of it. He might well have quoted 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.’ Indeed it is that starting point which distinguishes a vocational attitude to life from a simply worldly or prudential one.
 
Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century devised his ‘Spiritual Exercises’ in part, at least, as a tool to help people to discern their vocation. He draws a distinction between two approaches. In one approach, I decide what I would like to do, and then ask God to bless my decision – the way we very often go about things.  In the other, my one central desire is to seek to do what is more to the glory of God; to respond as totally as possible to the love which God lavishes upon me. Within that central desire and choice, I weigh up the particular choice before me. In the light of that central choice of God, am I called to marriage? Am I called to religious life? Is God calling me to serve him as a priest? Behind that way of thinking about vocation lies the conviction that the God who has created me out of love seeks my total fulfilment as a person; the conviction that it is in following my true vocation that I will find true joy. Not perhaps instant ease or obvious happiness, but true joy.
 
The heart of this understanding of vocation as a way of living which puts God at the absolute centre is reflected repeatedly in this Sunday’s readings. The Second Reading from St John’s letter begins from God’s love for us and concludes with the vision of God – seeing God face to face. This is the context for vocational living which the world simply cannot understand. In the Gospel, this uncomprehending attitude is the attitude of the ‘hired man’, the man who has no commitment, in the end, but to his own interests, his own skin. The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, reflects the Father’s love for the flock. The Good Shepherd reflects that love through which we are drawn into a loving relationship with God – a relationship which reflects the love between the Father and the Son. The Good Shepherd reveals the Father’s love by giving his life for the sheep; and by the Father’s love he is raised from the dead. That total love of God for us, embodied in Jesus, rejected by the builders, becomes the cornerstone, the foundation upon which any well-built life must rest. In Jesus, the Good Shepherd, that love is embodied, so that, as Peter says, Jesus is the only name in which salvation in its true and fullest sense can be found.
 
Today we pray for vocations. We pray that those who are at the point of making life-choices may make them upon that foundation and drawn by that Love. We pray that all of us, at whatever stage, may in all things prefer nothing to Christ; that we may in all things great and small, respond to God’s love, and seek first God’s praise and God’s glory.

Third Sunday of Easter, Year ‘B’ (2012)

One thing has particularly struck me at Mass this Easter, I suppose as a result of the new translation. Unfamiliar words are sometimes a distraction in worship, but they can also draw attention to things which familiarity allows to slip past us. It is the Easter Prefaces to the Eucharistic Prayer which have arrested me.  And the thing which has struck me this year in the Easter Prefaces is the scope of the resurrection. In the one we are using today (Preface IV), we say: ‘with the old order destroyed, a universe cast down is renewed’. In the resurrection of Jesus, the whole universe is being renewed. It is actually an echo of the Second Reading today, where St John says that what the sacrifice of Jesus has achieved, what the death and resurrection of Jesus has achieved, is the taking away of the sins of the whole world. In fact it is more than that. The word for world is in fact cosmos. He is saying, amazingly, that the reconciliation of the whole cosmos has been achieved by the death and resurrection of Jesus. So that particular Preface makes the biggest claim of all. But every Easter Preface makes a claim at least for this world, and for the human race as a whole. Because Jesus is risen, ‘Every land, every people exults in your praise’.. My first reaction to this was that it was a wild exaggeration. Most people haven’t even noticed that we are celebrating, let alone what we are celebrating. It felt to me almost like telling a lie in the middle of prayer. But the point is that what we are celebrating at Easter is in fact an event with implications that are universal. It is an event which has implications for the whole human race, whether they are aware of it or not.
 
In today’s Gospel, the first part picks up the same theme as last Sunday. Last Sunday the doubting of St Thomas enabled us to recognise the reality of the resurrection of Jesus. The same is emphasised today. ‘Look at my hands and my feet.’ The risen Jesus still bears the wounds of his Passion and death on the Cross. There is also the rather curious description of the risen Jesus eating a piece of grilled fish. The point is that the risen Lord is still his fully human self. And yet that human self has passed beyond death; he has passed beyond the limitations of earthly life. We still need to keep hold of all that.
 
But the second part of the Gospel moves us on from there. Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘So it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’  This is very familiar stuff. We are used to hearing passages from the Old Testament scriptures, perhaps particularly the prophet Isaiah, which seem to foretell, and help us to understand, the passion of Christ. We are familiar too with the call to repentance. That is an oft-repeated theme of preachers. We have heard it too from the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus. Practically the first thing Jesus is recorded as saying is ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ And we understand the link between personal repentance and the forgiveness of sins. And to know ones sins forgiven, and to come into a right relationship with God – these are huge blessings. It would certainly be a mistake to belittle them, and I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that our individual response to God is unimportant.
 
However, at the end of the Gospel, Jesus is claiming that what the Scriptures foretell is this: that as a result of his death and resurrection, there will be a message to be preached to all nations. It will be a message involving ‘repentance’ – involving a change of heart and a change of direction. But when Jesus, throughout the Gospel, proclaims the nearness of the Kingdom of God, and indeed when the Old Testament prophets issue a call to repentance, it is not simply a call addressed to individuals. It is a call addressed to a nation, to a people. Isaiah foresees a wonderful future for God’s chosen people, but he sees it in the context of a new heaven and a new earth; he sees it in the context of a new era not just for the Jews but for all the nations on earth. A new era when justice will truly be done; when tyranny will be overthrown, when the poor will be truly valued and counted as blessed. We hear this again in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
 
In the First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles, St Peter is addressing a Jewish audience. He is telling them that they were responsible for the death of Jesus. But he is also telling them that they acted in ignorance. And he tells them that in fact what they did has led, in the providence of God, to the best possible outcome both for them and for the whole world, provided they will accept it. ‘You killed the Holy One, the Just One, the Prince of Life. God however raised him from the dead, and to that fact we are witnesses.’ As in the Gospel, Peter ends with a call to repentance, but he then goes on to tell them – after the end of today’s passage - that they are in fact the final heirs to the promise made centuries ago to Abraham. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, the Prince of Life, the promise made to Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him is actually coming true. The Easter Preface, which seems so apparently wild and exaggerated, reflects this understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the event upon which the whole history of the world hinges; This understanding of the resurrection sees it as the beginning of a new and wonderful and indeed final era in the story of God’s dealings with his world.
 
We live in an age when truth is constantly relativised. Religions and their world-views are simply seen as possible alternatives which people may or may not choose to adopt as a matter of personal preference. We may even hear the command of Jesus to go and preach to all nations in that light. As you might say, ‘Christianity is a good brand – it is worth trying for a world-wide market.’ But the scandalous and extraordinary truth to which the whole Bible story bears witness is this: that God’s purpose for the restoration of the human race, the salvation of all the nations of the world, hinges on the history and experience of one little nation, a nation with Jerusalem at its heart. Within that nation, it hinges on the experience and especially the suffering of some particular people, and it hinges ultimately on one Man – a Man who was formed within the tradition of that nation, and whose story is incomprehensible without the tradition of that nation – one Man who carries the whole weight of humanity’s separation from God. ‘He is the sacrifice that takes our sins away’ says St John. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ says St Paul. It is the same message. It is not just a hope for the world, it is the hope for the world. And the proclamation of it begins from Jerusalem.  It begins from Jerusalem, but it now involves us.

EASTER SUNDAY 2012 (cf 2005)

    ‘Catholicism…is a profoundly fleshly faith, which understands that we live by the body rather than just the mind.’ I originally read those words in an article about two Catholic artists. But those words could equally be applied to today’s Easter Gospel. Last night at the Easter Vigil, the final Gospel message was that the risen Christ was going ahead of us into Galilee, ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’. The risen Christ goes ahead of us out into the secular world. But on Easter morning we are once more brought back to the empty tomb. A retrograde step, you might think. Why back to the tomb? You might well echo the words of the angel in St Luke’s account: ‘Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?’ Does this empty tomb really matter?
 
 The empty tomb is certainly not the whole story, as I think the other readings at this Mass make very clear. But it is nevertheless important. Catholicism is a profoundly fleshly faith. Those who try to spiritualise the resurrection of Jesus find the empty tomb a bit of an embarrassment. It would be so much easier simply to believe that the ‘Spirit of Jesus’ somehow survived his death on the Cross, and now inspires his followers. But Catholicism is a profoundly fleshly faith. It is interested in bodies as well as minds. This same Gospel from which we have read this morning proclaims at its beginning that the Word of God was made flesh. If the flesh was that important at the beginning, it remains important at the end. God in Christ took our human flesh and dwelt among us; God in Christ took the form of a servant and was humble even to accepting bodily death on a Cross; God in Christ has taken that flesh - that humanity in its body-and-soul  totality – through death, into a life beyond death in and with God.
 
In one sense this too is a mystery beyond our grasp. In the Gospel, it is John, the beloved disciple, who grasps it. Peter goes blundering into the tomb in his usual fashion; John lingers on the outside; he takes in deeply the empty tomb in front of him – he sees, and he believes. He realises in that moment that this is the tomb not of the dead but of the living Christ.
 
‘He saw and he believed.’ That is obviously the climax of the Gospel. But there are also the strange details about the shroud and the grave clothes. It is possible, I suppose, that these details are there because they were known to be treasured relics. But they may also be there because they emphasise that the rising of Jesus was so different from the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he emerges wrapped in his grave-clothes. This emphasises that he has simply been restored to life in this world; in due course he must die again. Jesus too rises bodily; but in his resurrection his very flesh is transfigured and transformed. And he leaves his grave-clothes behind. He will have no further use for them. He has passed permanently through death into a dimension of life which is beyond the reach of death; to a life which is defined by the mystery of his communion with the Father in the Holy Spirit, a life which is totally defined ‘from above’. Risen, Jesus lives with the life of the Kingdom of Heaven which he had proclaimed to be very near. Risen from the dead, Jesus now quite literally embodies that Kingdom of Heaven.
 
 In a moment we will renew once again the promises of our baptism. As Christians, as members of the Body of the risen Christ, it is our baptism which is now our defining truth. Through our baptism we have been united to Christ in his risen life. Through our baptism we share in ‘true life’, the life of the Kingdom of heaven, – life as God intended it to be. That is as true for us now as it will be true for us too beyond death. As St Paul says in the Second Reading, ‘You have already died’. The transition involved in my baptism is an even greater one than the transition implied in my physical death. This is extremely hard for us to grasp. Most of the time we are conscious of being little different from the rest of humanity. We muddle along, trying more or less to be good, and also more or less aware of our weaknesses and our failures. We are pretty deeply imbued with the values and preoccupations of the secular culture within which we live. Even if we take some time not only on Sundays, but each day, to recall our relationship to the risen Christ, we are probably not particularly conscious that it informs our every moment.
 
In one sense we should not be. We do not have to be conscious at every moment of the attitudes we have learnt from family or mentors in our childhood in order to live in accordance with them. But those attitudes were formed through daily exposure to a tradition of living at our most impressionable time. Once beyond childhood, profound change becomes harder. The grace of our baptism is never withdrawn, but it remains constantly up to us to open ourselves anew to it. ‘Let your thoughts be on heavenly things’ says St Paul. It sounds both a bit vague and a bit impractical. But the key words are ‘where Christ is’. As we are reminded in the letter to the Ephesians, Christ our Lord, risen and ascended, is not just ‘above’; rather, he ‘fills all things’ (Eph.4.10). May this Easter be for us all a moment when we root ourselves again consciously in that deepest truth, the truth of our baptism. ‘Catholicism is a profoundly fleshly faith.’ Your life, my life now, lived in the flesh – that life and its every moment is hidden with the risen Christ in God. Every Sunday is an Easter, and every Sunday this truth is renewed for us. Today, as every week, Christ raised to life beyond death unites us again to himself in the mystery of his Body and Blood. It is his flesh, raised to glory, which is the defining reality of my life.

Holy Thursday: Mass of the Lord’s Supper (2012)

‘I have given you an example’ says Jesus. An example of what? Well, you might say it is fairly obvious. Washing the feet of his disciples, he has given an example of humility; humility and love. That is how we are called to behave, both within the Christian community and beyond it. That is both true and good, but there is rather more to this Gospel than that. We need to go back to the beginning, where St John gives us the context of this prophetic action of Jesus, this washing of the feet.
 
It was, he says, before the feast of the Passover. This is something which is particular to St John’s Gospel. Matthew, Mark and Luke all link the Last Supper, the event we particularly commemorate this evening, at the beginning of our three-day celebration of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, with the celebration of the Passover itself. St John does not make that identification. He says that it happened before the Passover.
 
He says this very deliberately, but he certainly doesn’t mean that what we are doing now has no connection with the Passover. There is a very close connection. That connection is emphasised in our liturgy this evening by the account of the origins of the Jewish Passover in our First Reading. But for St John, the real Passover is not today but tomorrow. At that original Passover as described in the book of Exodus, the lambs were killed, and the blood smeared on the doorposts of the houses to protect the community of Israel from death -the death visited upon all the first-born in the land of Egypt. God’s people were saved from death by the blood of the lamb. For St John, there is no doubt what that ancient story looked forward to. It pointed to the one whom John the Baptist identified at the beginning of that same Gospel as ‘The Lamb of God’. ‘Behold the Lamb of God; behold him who takes away the sins of the world.’
 
Those words of John the Baptist we now hear at every Mass. The true Lamb of God, the one who truly removes the barrier of our sin, the one who truly saves us from the death which is the consequence of sin, is Jesus; Jesus who offered himself in total and loving obedience to the Father on the Cross; Jesus who on the Cross suffered all that we could inflict on him, and continued to love us and indeed to forgive us. ‘Father forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.’ ‘He had always loved those who were his own in the world, but now he showed how perfect his love was.’ He loved them to the end; he loved them to the limit. And, indeed, beyond the limit. That is the perfect sacrifice, the one and only true sacrifice, to which all other sacrifices look forward. The sacrifice in which the victim (the one who is offered in sacrifice) and the priest  ( the priest who offers the sacrifice) are one. ‘Behold the Lamb of God; behold him who takes away the sins of the world.’ It is through what happens tomorrow, on Good Friday, that God acts finally and decisively to restore the broken relationship between God and the human beings whom he has created in his image.
 
 What Jesus does with his friends on this evening, on the evening of his Last Supper, is to give the meaning of what is going to happen. He gives the meaning, and he associates his friends, his disciples, with that supreme event. It will look like a common execution; his friends won’t understand; in fact they will run away. But that will not be the end of the story. Later they will realise the meaning, and from that day on, as they do what we are doing now; as they do what our Lord himself has told us to do, they, and we, have communion with that sacrifice. We are united with our risen Lord, and brought in and with Him into the real presence of God.
 
So Jesus washing the feet of his disciples is much more than an example of loving humility. You could say that it is an image – a prophetic sign – which sums up our whole faith. The Gospel tells us that Jesus did this in the knowledge that he was about to be betrayed. He did it in the knowledge that the final crisis of the Cross was imminent. And he did it ‘knowing that the Father had put everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was returning to God’. God has invested everything in this moment. The whole rescue plan for God’s creation rests on what is about to happen. But it is not an event in total isolation. Tomorrow will be the day of the supreme sacrifice, but the whole life of Jesus is a sacrifice of obedience to the Father, and indeed a demonstration of the Father’s love. ‘Knowing that he had come from God and was returning to God, he got up from table, and removed his outer garment.’ The context of the washing of the feet is that self-emptying, that stripping, which St Paul spoke of last Sunday: ‘Being in the form of God, he did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.’ By sharing our humanity Jesus, while also remaining in fact ‘equal with God’, strips himself of his Godhead. So also his removing of his garments at the foot-washing also looks forward to that further stripping which is to take place tomorrow – that stripping which precedes the crucifixion; that stripping by which Jesus the Son of God makes himself totally vulnerable to his enemies, to the bystanders, to us. He makes himself totally vulnerable out of love.
 
So tonight we celebrate the Christian Passover. We celebrate that meal through which Jesus himself, our great high priest, links us to his one sacrifice through which he passes over from this world to the Father. Through this meal our communion with him and with his sacrifice is constantly renewed – renewed in every place and in every age – as through the gift of his Body he incorporates us here and now into that Body which was given up for us and is now risen and glorified.  Through this meal our communion with him and his sacrifice is constantly renewed as he shares his very life-blood with us, that life-blood which was poured out in death – poured out on the Cross to save us from death. Through this meal and communion with him he shares with us his risen and glorified life, the life he shares for ever with the Father in the union of the Holy Spirit.
 
‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ This mandate of Jesus, this mandate from which the word ‘Maundy’ derives, is much more than a moral instruction, it is a new pattern for living, and for living in a new context. And it is addressed specifically to the Church – to the community of Christians. For what the death and resurrection of Jesus initiates is God’s new creation. In Jesus crucified and risen; in Jesus who came from the Father and has now passed over from this world to the Father, humanity has been renewed. In union and communion with our crucified and risen Lord, we are called to live humble love in a way which reflects the very nature of the God who is love; to live in a way which reflects the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus the Son gives us his Body that we may become his Body. He gives us an example; he gives us an almost impossible challenge. But to the glory of the Father, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, he also gives us no less than Himself.  
      

5th SUNDAY of LENT, Year ‘B’ (2012)

In the Bidding Prayers, practically every Sunday, we pray for the peace of the world. Sometimes we do so in very general terms; often we pray for peace in a particular area of the world which happens to be in the news. What, I wonder, are we praying for? At the most obvious level we are praying that hostilities may cease and that suffering may end. We are praying for the people directly affected, but we are also at least hoping for a quieter life for ourselves within the context of this world. We are lucky not to be living in Syria or Afghanistan, but it would be nice not to have to worry about them any more. What do we expect as an answer to our prayer? Perhaps the answer is that in reality we expect very little. Our prayer is perhaps sometimes little more than a pious hope covering a sense of something near despair. We do not expect God suddenly to intervene as a result of our prayer and clear the whole mess up. We might perhaps expect that somehow as a result of our prayer the world may be just that little bit more open to the compassion and mercy of God; or that as a result of our prayer someone may be inspired to some courageous action which will move others in the direction of peace. Possibly… So what are we praying for when we pray for peace? Clearly the answer is not straightforward.
 
I was led to this reflection by today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah. It envisages a day – a day which the prophet assures us is coming – when the Law of God will be written deep within the heart of each person. There will be no need for the Law of God to be imposed on people. There will even be no need for people to be instructed in it. A day is coming when living in accordance with the Law of God will be second nature for everyone. Everyone will love the Lord their God with all their heart; everyone will love their neighbour as themselves. And they will do it naturally. There will be no need to tell them to; there will be no need for any enforcement. The barrier, the distance, which we have created between ourselves and God by our sin will have been definitively overcome. ‘No, they will all know me – it is the Lord who speaks – since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.’
 
This is a stupendous vision. It is indeed a vision of peace in the fullest sense. It is a vision of the Kingdom of God for which we pray. ‘Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’ How easily that phrase trips off our tongues. And yet it is the most extraordinary prayer. In the course of history things have got better in certain ways; over time some countries have become more civilised and law-abiding, perhaps; but even then it doesn’t do to look to closely, and so-called civilised societies have over time collapsed and slipped back towards what might be called barbarism. Jeremiah said the day was coming when God would make a New Covenant with the House of Israel; from our Christian perspective we would probably, and with reason, want to interpret that more inclusively, and speak of a New Covenant with the human race. But that day seems as far off as ever. We pray for peace, but no peace comes. The vision of Jeremiah doesn’t seem to stand an earthly chance of being realised in the course of our human history. Is there any point in even entertaining such a hope?
 
Jeremiah was a very unsuccessful prophet. He lived in a deeply troubled time, and was himself severely persecuted. The hope he continued to hold to was rooted simply and solely in his faith in God. If his vision was to be realised, it would absolutely and unequivocally the work of God. It is, as it were, at that point, that our other two readings this Sunday take up the story – the story of God’s New Covenant.
 
The Gospel begins with that wonderfully simple incident which evokes such an extraordinary response from Jesus. Some Greeks – some Gentile Greeks – come to Philip with that simple request, ‘Sir, we should like to see Jesus.’ They were ordinary people who spoke what was then the everyday language of the wider world. And these ordinary people wanted to see Jesus. ‘Sir, we would like to see Jesus.’ It is a prayer with which we can all identify; a prayer we can all easily make our own.
 
When Jesus hears this, he knows that the moment has come. ‘Now is the Son of Man to be glorified.’ Now is the Father’s name to be glorified. Now the whole purpose of God for the human race is about to be fulfilled. Now that Day of which Jeremiah dreamed, that Day when God would establish a New Covenant with humanity – that Day had arrived. You could say that this was the moment when God’s Kingdom was about to come on earth as it is in heaven. It should have been the moment, you might think, when peace would suddenly break out. When God would step in to make it all right, as we would so much like God to do.
 
But what actually happens? ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain.’ ‘Now is my soul troubled. What shall I say? Father save me from this hour?’ It is the moment of the glorification of Jesus; it is the moment of the glorification of the name of the Father. But it feels more like the Garden of Gethsemane. ‘Father, save me from this hour.’ Those words we heard from the Letter to the Hebrews pick up the same resonance: ‘During his life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death.’  ‘Although he was a Son, he learnt to obey through suffering.’ If the New Covenant is to be established in the midst of the reality of the world as we know it, it can only be by following this path. There is no way round; there is no quick and easy fix. And it isn’t only Jesus who is asked to follow this path. ‘If someone wants to serve me, let him follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be.’ ‘Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who is not attached to his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ One way or another, it is the path for all of us. There is no escape. No escape, but we tread it with Jesus.
 
The Garden of Gethsemane is such an important moment in the journey of the Passion of Jesus because there we see clearly the real struggle he had in the face of suffering and death. He longed for there to be a solution to the conflict in which he was engaged – a solution on this side of that ultimate act of both obedience and trust in God. Couldn’t the Father just step in and make it all right? Couldn’t the storm be stilled and peace be established without having to go through all this?  ‘Father, glorify your name.’ ‘Nevertheless, Father, your will be done.’
 
We are all about to go once more with Jesus on this journey through his Passion. It is a hard story to stay with. We naturally shrink from the pain of it, although we can only grasp a tiny fraction of it. It meets us, if you think of it, at every Mass. ‘This is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the New and eternal Covenant.’ There is no way to that New Covenant, no way to the fulfilment of that wonderful vision of Jeremiah, except through the Blood of the Cross. We need to face the reality of the suffering; the suffering in the Passion of Jesus, the suffering in the Passion of our tortured world, the suffering also in our personal journeys – the suffering which comes the way of all of us in one form or another. There is no way out; no quick fix. But even in the midst of this reality and this world, if we too would see Jesus, God holds out to us too that hope beyond hope which sustained the prophet Jeremiah. ‘Jesus, although he was a Son, learned to obey through suffering; but having been made perfect, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation.’ ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’

3rd SUNDAY of LENT, Year ‘B’ (2012) (EH)

‘Jesus did not entrust himself to them, because he knew what was in man’. He knew the confusion and the fickleness of the human heart. That is the last word we hear in the Gospel today, following on from the prophetic action of driving the traders from the Temple – traders who had encroached on the place of God’s presence. Following that prophetic action, the authority of Jesus is challenged. The response of Jesus to that challenge is even more puzzling: ‘Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up’. Only later did his disciples realise that it was the body of Jesus which was the true place of God’s presence, the real sanctuary. At the time, this riddling proclamation of Jesus sounded like blasphemy. Indeed, it would be one of the accusations made against him by those who sought his death.
 
Jesus knew what was in man. Jesus knew the confusion and the fickleness of the human heart. The mission of Jesus was, and is, the restoration of the human heart to its true centre. The restoration of the human heart to union and communion with God. And, in that context, the restoration of proper relationships between human beings. ‘For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’. Throughout history God has been working at that restoration. As we are reminded by the letter to the Hebrews each Christmas, ‘At many moments in the past and by many means, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in these final days he has spoken to us in the person of his Son.’ Or, as we hear in the fourth Eucharistic Prayer, ‘time and again God offered us covenants’.  It is that series of covenants of which we are reminded during these Sundays of Lent; covenants with Noah, with Abraham, and this week with Moses. God’s covenants offer both a promise and a challenge. God will surely keep his side of the promise, but we are called to live in a way which is true to our humanity. We are called to live in a way which is appropriate for human beings created in the image of God.
 
‘Jesus knew what was in man.’ Jesus was aware of our fallenness. There has been a good deal of discussion recently about how to understand the Christian doctrine of ‘the Fall’, that doctrine which has usually been illustrated by the story of Adam and Eve. The questioning has once again centred around how to understand this story in the light of evolutionary theory. There certainly are some interesting issues here.  But it is a matter of simple observation that human beings are not what they might be; that they have made, and are still making, a mess of their attempts to live together; that they are still making a mess of the environment they inhabit. St Thomas Aquinas, I believe, says that if the human race had not ‘fallen’, the Ten Commandments would have been obvious to us as guidelines for living in human society. It would not have been necessary for God to have specially revealed them to us. They are, in fact, rules that are not some sort of outward imposition by God. They are rules which are fundamentally in accord with our human nature.
 
‘Jesus did not entrust himself to them, because he knew what was in man.’ This text is, I think, extremely relevant to a matter to which our Archbishops are particularly seeking to draw our attention this week.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols and Archbishop Peter Smith, on behalf of the Bishops’ Conference, have written us a letter about marriage.
 
They have done this because the government is about to present a consultation paper on the proposed change in the legal definition of marriage in this country.  This change is to allow same-sex partnerships to be defined as ‘marriage’. Personally, in our present society, I would support civil partnerships as a simple matter of justice. But to give such partnerships the name of ‘marriage’ is another matter. The issue at stake is not whether the Catholic Church will be obliged to allow such ‘marriages’ in church. We will almost certainly keep our freedom in that respect. What our bishops are urging us to speak up about is not a Church issue. It is much bigger than that. It is the issue of the fundamental meaning of marriage.
 
The teaching of the Catholic Church on sexuality and marriage has not been popular and it has not been easy. But the most important thing about it is that the Catholic Church has always emphasised the link between sexuality, marriage and procreation; sexuality, marriage and children. This is a link which has been weakened in other Christian traditions, and in the secular context has got completely lost. So in the secular context, all the talk is about the value of commitment. Marriage is about love and commitment; nothing more. Nothing at all is said about the procreation of children.
 
At the time when the legal definition of marriage was formulated, the purpose of procreation would have been so obvious that it did not need to be stated; it was contained within the meaning of the word itself. The legal definition simply speaks of the union of one man and one woman for life. There is a petition on line which you can sign pleading for the upholding of that legal definition. But ultimately that definition, as it stands, rests on the fundamental fact that for every single child on this planet, however they may have been conceived, there was involved in that conception a man and a woman. That is the natural and inescapable foundation of family life.
 
For all sorts of reasons there are variations on that natural pattern. Single parents have been wonderful; adoptions have provided special love and security; marriages without children have been centres of outreach, warmth and welcome to many. All of that is good; all of that is part of the rich pattern of difference. But none of this would happen at all in a world where marriage ceased to have any connection with fertility and procreation; where openness to the continuance of the human race was simply excluded as part of the essential meaning of marriage.
 
This is something that is written deeply into our nature as human beings. Indeed we believe it is written there by God. I am sure that if you could consult the whole population about this change, particularly given what is now offered by civil partnerships; if you were to consult the whole population about the legal definition, they might question the life-long element, but they would not question that it should be a relationship between a man and a woman.  This is an issue on which Catholics must make their voices heard, not just for ourselves, but on behalf of people as a whole. Sign the petition, but also write at least to your MP. If this change comes about, it will be extremely difficult to reverse. It is an issue which touches our nature as human beings. It will be a change brought about, in effect, by a bunch of traders who have taken over the space intended for God in the Temple.  Jesus knew the confusion and the fickleness of the human heart. ‘Jesus did not entrust himself to them, because he knew what was in man’.

2nd SUNDAY of LENT, Year B (2012)

‘God did not spare his own Son.’ That is what lies at the heart of all of today’s Readings. That strange and wonderful mystery of the Transfiguration is a turning point in St Mark’s Gospel. From that moment Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem and begins to speak to his disciples of his coming suffering and death. But in the Transfiguration itself, the Father confirms what had already been revealed at the baptism of Jesus – ‘This is my beloved Son.’
 
Then in the Old Testament reading we have the terrible story of the sacrifice of Isaac. It is a terrible story, but it is also one of the great stories of the Old Testament. (It is worth taking out your Bibles and reading the full version – Genesis chapter 22.) Perhaps our first reaction these days is to think ‘What sort of a God would order a human sacrifice?’ Or, worse, ‘What sort of a God would pretend to order a human sacrifice?’
 
We need to lay those questions aside. It is a story which originated in a culture where human sacrifice was widely accepted. One point of the story in its original context may well have been precisely to show that God does not want human sacrifice. As an element in the whole Old Testament story, its primary emphasis is on Abraham’s total trust in God; Abraham’s total obedience, even where his whole promised future seemed to be at stake. Abraham is the ‘father in faith’ of the Old Testament People of God; Abraham remains ‘our father in faith’ as well, as we recall every time we use the First Eucharistic Prayer.
 
But for us the power of the story comes from another story which it echoes in such a remarkable way. It is powerful as a human story because we can feel the emotional tension which must underlie the dialogue between the father and the son – between Abraham and Isaac – as they plod on towards Mount Moriah. But it is above all powerful because it is a Way of the Cross. Isaac carries the wood for the sacrifice as Jesus bore the Cross. Isaac, at the last moment, is spared, and the ram is sacrificed instead. This does not happen to Jesus. In his case, he himself is revealed as the Lamb of God, the Lamb led to the slaughter.
 
We began with the question, ‘Why should God demand human sacrifice?’ He doesn’t. And yet, here, it seems, is a human sacrifice. After all, we speak of the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, that saving sacrifice which is made present for us at Mass. But try looking at this in the light of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
 
In this Old Testament Way of the Cross, Father and Son journey together. In the very silence of Abraham as he journeys with Isaac, you can sense that the Father is entirely at one with the Son; the Son’s shrinking and pain is right there in the heart of the Father also. This helps us to understand the New Testament Way of the Cross. This is not a sacrifice to appease an angry God. This is God’s own sacrifice. Father and Son journey together. This is God coming to meet the powers of darkness at work within our world – to meet them on their own ground, and with no other weapon than the weapon of love. This is the God who is for us, not against us. The God who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – the God who seeks to give us not only the gift of his Son, but with that greatest of gifts, to grace us with everything else as well.   

FIRST SUNDAY of LENT (Year B) 2012

The season of Lent is a preparation for the central Christian of what we call ‘the Paschal Mystery’, the celebration of Easter. Lent is a wilderness time; its forty days recall the forty days during which Jesus was in the wilderness, tempted by Satan. But its central purpose is to deepen our discipleship so that we can enter more fully into the ‘Passover Mystery’ - the passing over of Jesus from death to life.
 
This Sunday we are given a huge context for that mystery of the dying and rising of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are taken back to God’s covenant with Noah. The rainbow that came at the end of the catastrophic flood was a sign of God’s promise not to destroy the earth. God’s saving purpose embraces us, but it also embraces the world in which we are set.  And that salvation through Jesus Christ embraces not only the whole creation, but also, as St Peter tells us in the Second Reading, ‘the spirits in prison’. It works backwards in time as well as forwards. It embraces not only us, who live after the pivotal event of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also those who lived before it. God’s purpose, in and through Jesus Christ, is  to bring us and the whole creation into that life of loving obedience to God in which we will find our true freedom and our true joy.
 
That is, you might say, the big picture. It is the big picture into which fits our Lenten discipline. We will all, I am sure, have been asking ourselves over the last few days, ‘What shall I do this Lent?’ God’s great work of overflowing love and generosity, God’s great work of creation and salvation in Jesus Christ and our response to this love and generosity of God – that is the context of Lent, and the context in which I want to set all I am now going to say. What I am going to say may seem far away from that great vision, but it should not be. It needs to be seen as one aspect of our total response to that great vision. I am going to talk – as I have almost never done before – I am going to talk about money.
 
Last weekend the summary of the Parish Accounts for 2011 was published. It shows that the ordinary costs of running the parish are just about matched by our income. That sounds fine. But it also shows that in addition we have spent, in the past year, some £25,000 on the maintenance and improvement of our  churches. Both in Our Lady of the Rosary and at Holy Rood, these improvements have been a great success. They were well worth doing. But we could only do them because we had capital from the sale of the Church of St Pius X in Wootton some years ago. The five-yearly report on the state of all our buildings has just been received, and will certainly mean further expenditure beyond the ordinary running costs of the parish. We are living, in fact, way beyond our income. But it is worse than that. Because nearly half our ordinary running expenses are met through rents we receive – mostly for letting out Good Shepherd Church in Kennington, and letting the official Presbytery of the Parish in Westminster Way. In the future the next Parish Priest will need to live there. And the Headway Head-injuries Charity at Good Shepherd won’t be there for ever. We have been very fortunate to be able to keep going as we have so far. But we need to think about running the parish and its buildings in a sustainable way in accordance with our real income. As a Parish, can we really afford to live as we have become accustomed?
 
So, you might think, here comes the punch line. ‘Thank you for all you give to the Church, but please give more generously’.  No, that is not where I want to go with this. I want to go back to Lent. As I was thinking about my own response to Lent this year, one of the things that I became aware of was that for too long I had not looked at my own giving, both to the Church and to other charities. So I have resolved to review my own giving. How should I, as a Christian, set about that?
 
There are no absolute rules, which is a blessing. There are, of course, what are called ‘The Precepts of the Church’. These are what the Catechism calls ‘a necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort’. These precepts include the obligation to attend Mass every Sunday, and at least annual Confession. But they also include ‘you shall help to provide for the needs of the Church, each according to his own ability.’ So we have an obligation to give something to the Church, but there is no guidance about how to think about it. For help with that, we need to turn to Scripture.
 
The starting point for any thinking about giving must be the recognition that in fact everything that I have is a gift from God. So King David prays over the offerings collected for building the Temple at Jerusalem: ‘Who am I, O Lord, and what is my people, that we should be able to make this freewill-offering? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.’ (1 Chron. 29.14) That is worth pondering. It is a long way from our natural mind-set. But it is true that we cannot give to God anything which is not already a gift from God. If that is the case, then the fundamental motive for all my giving is gratitude to God for God’s gifts. I may be giving to support my parish, or to the work of CAFOD, or to some other cause close to my heart. But my fundamental motive is my recognition that all I have is a gift of God.
 
To recognise that is to give a different priority to giving. When someone rattles a tin under our noses in the street, we give out of what we can spare.  But if I really take on board the understanding that all that I have is fundamentally a gift from God, then my giving will not simply be out of what at the end of the day I can spare. It will be, as it were, the starting-point of my budgeting. That is the principle which we find in many places in the Bible. ‘Honour the Lord with your substance, and with the first-fruits of all your produce’ says the Book of Proverbs. Jesus himself echoes this when he says ‘give, and it will be given unto you’.
 
So if I am reviewing my giving as a Lenten exercise; if I am trying to think about it as a response to God’s generosity; if I am trying to decide what is an appropriate offering to God as the ‘first-fruits’, as the first call on my resources, how do I go about it?
 
The place to begin is in prayer.  I need to think about this in a conscious awareness of God – the generosity of God, and perhaps also of my own tendency to want to cling to what I have as if it did belong entirely to me, and was not in fact God’s gift. And in that light I need to review my disposable resources. I don’t have a mortgage, because I am lucky enough to live in a house provided by the church. Mortgage payments are probably for many the largest call on their income, and such income is hardly ‘disposable’. I can make choices about housekeeping, but not about mortgage payments. But how much should I give as a proportion of my disposable income? The Old Testament speaks a good deal about ‘tithes’ – about giving a tenth of your income. Some Christians try to live by that, and it is very impressive. But ‘tithes’ belong to an era before income tax. And this is not something about which to become legalistic. ‘I give tithes of all that I possess’ says the self-satisfied Pharisee in the parable. But it is worth thinking about a definite proportion – if not 10%, then 5% perhaps? And then to recognise that at the heart of this is not duty but generosity… God’s generosity. God’s generosity that I am called to reflect. As St Paul says, (2 Cor.9) ‘Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver’.
 
I shall try myself to have a look at my own giving along these lines as part of my own Lenten discipline. It will cover not only giving to the Church but other charitable giving as well. All of that is, after all, giving to God. I hope I have encouraged you perhaps to do the same. As a result you may be moved to give more. But you could realise that you need to give less, as your circumstances have changed. There is nothing wrong – indeed everything right – with that. This is not a covert attempt to solve the problems of the parish finances, even if that has been a spur. For that we must trust God, and try to live in line with the resources we have. What is much more important is that we come to a deeper realisation of the generosity of God, and recognise that a proper response to that is a first call on our resources. ‘All things come of you, O Lord, and of your own have we given you.’ And at the heart of Lent, at the heart of our faith, at the heart of this Mass, is that ultimate expression of God’s generosity and the ultimate reason for our thankful response: ‘God so loved the world that he gave - gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.’

4th SUNDAY of the YEAR (B) – 2012

Last Sunday I gave something of a personal testimony about why the Gospel of Jesus Christ was ‘good news’ to me. A number of people expressed their appreciation of this, but one person said that my focus on the Gospel was particularly welcome after ‘that dreadful Second Reading’. Last Sunday’s Second Reading was from St Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians (7: 29-31). Today we have been treated to a continuation of the same passage. And not only is St Paul my patron saint, but the Church celebrated the feast of his Conversion last Wednesday. So I feel a certain pressure to address myself today, at least in part, to what he says.
 
What was actually said to me last Sunday was that in that ‘dreadful’ passage, St Paul is telling us not to do all the things that really make life fun and worth living. I could see the point. What we heard, among other things, was this: ‘those who are enjoying life should live as though there were nothing to laugh about’. Particularly heard out of context, that does seem a bit steep. And then there is a splendid stab at the consumer society: ‘those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own’.
 
Well so much for last week’s passage. But what about this week?  It starts well enough. ‘I would like to see you free from all worry.’ That would be very nice. But then St Paul’s idea of what might free us from worry seems even worse than last week. Worry, both for men and for women, seems to have its root in marriage. His line is this: if only we didn’t have a husband or a wife to worry about and to please, we could devote ourselves whole-heartedly to the service of the Lord. So where does that leave the sacrament marriage, and the teaching of the Church that marriage is itself a way of holiness?
 
You can almost sense St Paul feeling he has gone a bit too far, as he quickly adds, ‘I say this only to help you, and not to put a noose round your necks.’ But if by then he hadn’t lost his original audience, I am pretty sure that by that point he will have lost most of us. Last week was ‘dreadful’ and this week doesn’t seem much better. But if we were feeling charitable, we may well have said to ourselves something like this: ‘You have to put St Paul in context. For one thing, he thought the world was going to end any moment. It really has nothing to say to us today. It’s dreadful stuff, but we can forget it and move on.’
 
Perhaps, in fact, we should not move on too hastily. But I am going to move on, although I shall return to St Paul in a moment. I am going to move on to the Gospel. The Gospel is about Jesus confronting a man possessed by an unclean spirit. Possession by evil spirits is also something with which again we are probably not very comfortable. But the heart of this Gospel does not depend on the detail of the incident. Because the heart of this Gospel is very clear. The heart of the Gospel is the authority of Jesus. ‘Here’, they said, ‘is a teaching with authority behind it.’ ‘His teaching made a deep impression on them, because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority.’
 
So, Jesus was a deeply impressive charismatic teacher. The scribes played around with texts, but Jesus made a real personal impression; a personal impression which carried conviction. He taught with authority.  We have all, I expect, experienced something of that difference in speakers or teachers we have encountered. So Jesus taught with authority. But the question is, whose authority? The answer is given in the Gospel, and given by the unclean spirit. ‘I know who you are: the Holy One of God.’ The authority of Jesus is the authority of God.
 
In today’s Gospel, we are still in the first chapter of St Mark. We are only at the very beginning of the story. But it is a story which St Mark and his hearers knew from beginning to end, and which we too know from beginning to end. When we hear that Jesus at the very beginning of his ministry taught with authority, we are reminded, perhaps, of the very end of St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations…’. That commission is given by the risen Jesus. It is given by Jesus who has confronted the evil of the world on the Cross, and triumphed over it by his resurrection.  In today’s Gospel too, Jesus is confronted by evil. The casting out of the evil spirit is a sign of the coming of God’s Kingdom.
 
The Kingdom of God is present in Jesus, and the evil one recoils from it. ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?’ Yes, indeed Jesus has come to destroy evil – to overcome evil with good; to face down evil with the love and forgiveness of God. In so far as our world is infected with evil, in so far as we are infected with evil, we naturally recoil from the authoritative presence of Jesus. He attracts us, but at the same time he makes us want to hide.
 
   This is the tension we all live with. This is the tension behind those ‘dreadful’ passages of St Paul with which we began. As followers and disciples of Jesus Christ, we live in the same world as everybody else. But we are asked to live in that world with the constant awareness that we are under the authority of Jesus Christ. We are committed to the new way of living which he has inaugurated by his life, his death and his resurrection. By our baptism into Jesus Christ we are part of his new creation; we already share in the life of the Kingdom of God which is fully visible in Jesus himself.
 
   This does not mean that we shouldn’t enjoy life. Joy, true joy, is one of the marks of God’s kingdom. But we are not to immerse ourselves in the life of this world so that we forget under whose authority we live. Married or unmarried, hermit or chief executive – whatever our particular vocation, Jesus is Lord. This is not something we just acknowledge on Sundays or in prayer. It is the context for every moment, every relationship, every decision. The point of this sacramental encounter at Mass with Jesus crucified and risen, the point of this regular gathering of the Christian family, the point of time for prayer and scripture – the point of all this is to help us to respond in every situation, naturally and habitually, in a Christ-like way. The point is to give us the skill to respond ‘in Christ’ in the midst of the activities of this world.
 
   At all times, our present world is full of challenges, and indeed full of moral dilemmas which can be desperately hard to resolve. Sometimes however there are issues which are clear, and there is one which is catching the headlines at the moment. It is the issue of the meaning and nature of marriage. The government wants to define as ‘marriage’ the relationship which is now called a ‘civil partnership’.  It is not for us, certainly, to cast stones at others, and I believe we can and should support civil partnerships as a matter of simple justice. But the nature of marriage was written by God into the created order long before any political institutions existed, and is quite specifically endorsed by Jesus – Jesus who teaches with authority, and not as the scribes. Marriage is of its nature ordered to the procreation and the nurture of children. It is simply not within the authority of civil government to decide to redefine the nature of marriage. ‘Those who deal with the world should not become engrossed in it.’ So St Paul told us last week. The proposal to redefine marriage is a clear example of becoming engrossed in the world, unable to see under whose authority the world ultimately lies. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, the Holy One of God. Those who will ultimately vote on this issue need to be reminded of what they are doing. As we leave this place we will be clearly told, ‘Go to announce the Gospel of the Lord.’ 

3rd SUNDAY of YEAR ‘B’ (2012)

Today at Mass we are in effect beginning the reading of this year’s Gospel, the Gospel according to St Mark.  ‘After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the Good News of God’. Jesus came, proclaiming the Gospel. ‘The Gospel’, the ‘Good News’ – these are extraordinarily familiar phrases; so familiar that we may never have taken time to think whether we know what they mean. St Mark gives us today a one sentence summary of the proclamation of Jesus. ‘The time has come, and the Kingdom of God is close at hand.’ That, apparently, is the Good News. And in response to it we are called to ‘repent’. In the face of the Good News, we are called to a change of heart. That is what ‘repent’ means – a change of heart. It is not so much about ‘sin’ as about the fundamental perspective in the light of which we live our lives.
 
As you can imagine, at various moments in my life – quite often in the middle of some noisy social occasion – people have asked me why I decided to offer myself for the priesthood. I don’t think my short answer to that question has ever changed. My short answer is this: ‘The Gospel of Jesus Christ is such good news that, if it is true, it is worth giving one’s life to proclaiming it – and I believe that it is true.’ That is the short answer. It may be a total conversation stopper, or, after that, the conversation may go anywhere. But today’s Gospel reminded me of that answer. And it made me ask myself a question. ‘What is it about the Gospel of Jesus Christ which makes me say that it is such ‘Good News’?
 
As I reflected on this question, my thoughts crystallised around four points. The first can be linked to that proclamation of Jesus, ‘the Kingdom of God is close at hand’. St Paul speaks of Jesus as ‘the image of the invisible God’. Jesus gives a visible focus for belief in the unutterable mystery of God. Belief in God is not particularly easy in our time. A major reason for this is the notion, very influential at present, that only those things can be called ‘true’ which are open to exploration by the methods of physical science. If we accept this, then many of the questions which we naturally ask as human beings cannot be answered. ‘Why is there anything at all?’; ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Is the music of Bach just so much froth on the surface of a physical universe bound for nothingness?’ ‘Is it all in the end without purpose?’ ‘What about love? What about that strange discovery that to find myself, to find happiness, I somehow have to give myself, to lose myself? Not everyone feels driven to ask that sort of question. But in the context of those sorts of questions, which many human beings at least never seem to stop asking, the Good News which finds its visible focus in Jesus is the news that God IS; that the universe is God’s Creation; in the famous phrase of the poet Dante, it is indeed ‘Love which moves the sun and the other stars’.
 
First, then, the Good News is linked with the fact that for me, at least, Jesus makes God believable. But that leads into the question which just about everyone immediately asks. If it is indeed Love which is behind the universe, what about suffering? The German evangelical pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis, wrote from his prison cell, ‘Only the suffering God can help’. For me, the God of love becomes believable precisely because God is not a God who remains apart from the world he creates. God does not simply survey the struggles of his creation, and of humanity, from the outside. If that were the case, however compassionately God regarded us, it would still be hard for me at least to believe that it was indeed ‘Love which moves the sun and the other stars’. So, secondly, the Good News is essentially linked to the mystery of Incarnation. It is linked to God actually sharing in our flesh and blood in the person of Jesus. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is in fact the only God in whom I could possibly believe.
 
The third reason that I have for finding the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be good news relates to our relationship with God. The emergence of some sort of belief in God does seem to have been universal among human beings. Often that belief has been very primitive and, we would probably say, distorted. It may have had more to do with fear than love. But it was and is there. And every attempt in our enlightened age to stamp out belief in God seems so far to have failed. In fact, St Augustine’s oft-quoted words seem to be true: ‘O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’. And yet our actual human experience is an experience of distance and separation from God. This is no doubt in one sense inevitable, for God is the mysterious, transcendent Creator. We are created beings. But along with the desire for God which we experience, there is also a force that pulls us in the opposite direction. A pull that works against love, which tries to set up my Self as a rival centre to God. A recent writer has linked this to evolutionary theory and the survival of the fittest. Is there anything in that? I don’t know. But the essence of what we talk about as ‘sin’ is there. The essence of sin is whatever moves us away from our relationship with the God who is Love. As human beings we experience a measure of freedom; without freedom love is impossible. But we don’t seem able on our own to overcome that pull to self-centredness. The distance between us and God remains. My third reason for finding the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be Good News is that in Jesus – Jesus who fully shared our humanity – that distance is overcome. In Jesus Christ there is a new creation. In communion with Jesus Christ the relationship with God for which we long, the relationship for which we are created, becomes possible.
 
Fourthly and finally, there is the Cross of Jesus and his Resurrection. It is clear from the Gospels, taken as a whole; it is clear from the witness of the earliest Christians; it is clear from the unchanging practice of the Church throughout the ages, that here is the heart of the Good News. It is, after all, the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus which is the mystery at the heart of every Mass, whatever other aspect of the life or teaching of Jesus may be referred to in it. The Cross of Jesus has sometimes been seen as a sacrifice placating an angry God. That view is, to say the least, unhelpful. The Cross of Jesus is a sacrifice, indeed the only sacrifice ultimately worthy of the name. But the point of a sacrifice is that it bridges the gap between humanity and God. It restores communion with God. How does Jesus restore communion with God by his Cross? This is a profound mystery, and the Church has never offered one simple answer to that question, so I must be careful. But the Good News for me in the Cross of Jesus is something like this. On the Cross we see Jesus in his humanity facing the sin and evil represented by those who have condemned him, and facing them with nothing but love. ‘Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.’ That is a love which no evil can destroy. By that love, the power of evil is in fact neutralised.
 
Also on the Cross we see Jesus experiencing death in its absolute darkness and apparent finality; experiencing separation from God in its most total form, and yet continuing to trust the God who appeared to be totally absent. Was that trust justified? Are we justified in trusting God in the face of darkness, and of absence, and of death? The resurrection of Jesus means many things, but one of them is a firm answer to that question. The Good News is, the answer is YES.   
  

EPIPHANY 2012

 I still have not quite got used to celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany on a Sunday; indeed I think some of us were half expecting that the Bishops might change their minds this year and give us back the Twelve Days of Christmas, with the celebration of the Epiphany on January 6th - last Friday. But it didn’t happen. So there is still the problem about when to dump the Christmas Tree, although it is very nice to have it still with us and so beautifully decorated today.
 
Anyway I found myself, with some difficulty, keeping last Friday as an ordinary Friday, and, in my prayer, praying the alternative Office for January 6th. But I couldn’t resist glancing in the direction of the Feast of the Epiphany by reading T. S. Eliot’s wonderful poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’. In it, one of the Wise Men is looking back in old age to that long journey made many years ago, and pondering its meaning. So he says, ‘There was a Birth, certainly; we had evidence and no doubt.’ In the poem, the Wise Men – the Magi – reach their objective, but there are none of the traditional trappings of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The emphasis is on two things - the journey, and the disturbing effect of encountering that Child, that Birth. At the end of the poem, the sense of disturbance is still there. The Wise Men don’t find the answer to their quest in some simple and straightforward sense. Rather, they come away with a profound sense of disturbance. But at the same time there is a profound sense of the fundamental significance of this Birth, this Child.
‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods…’. The heart of the poem is not the gifts but the journey; the heart of the poem is this sense of profound disturbance.
 
 This sense of disturbance is there in the Gospel as well. As a result of the journey of the Magi and their visit, King Herod too was ‘no longer at ease.’ ‘When King Herod heard of this, he was perturbed, and so was the whole of Jerusalem.’ The disturbing effect of this Birth is there in the Gospel; the theme of a journey is also reflected in the other two Readings and in the Psalm.
 
Take the Isaiah passage. In that, all the nations are seen as journeying to  Jerusalem; pouring into Jerusalem and bringing all their wealth with them. It is Jerusalem itself which is the star, the shining light which is irresistibly attractive. Jerusalem, the City of Peace, the place where God has chosen to dwell, draws to itself all the nations of the earth. They come bringing gold and incense, and singing the praise of the Lord. It is an extraordinary vision in itself, but the more extraordinary in the light of the opening verse. Isaiah reveals his vision at a time in which ‘night still covers the earth, and darkness the peoples’. It is easy to see this passage simply as a foreshadowing of the Feast of the Epiphany which we are celebrating. In fact, it is an extraordinary expression of hope in the context of an awareness of a world benighted, lost and stumbling in the dark.
 
A world benighted and in the dark. There is something of this too in the Reading from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. This passage is principally about the way in which, under the providence of God, St Paul himself has been given the particular role of making known the mystery of Jesus Christ to the pagans, to the Gentiles. For us as Christians two thousand years later, this is something we simply take for granted. It doesn’t feel particularly remarkable; it doesn’t even feel something that we ought to be amazingly grateful for. It is just how things are, and have been for centuries. But St Paul actually reminds us that it was not always so. It is worth remembering that for millennia the human race existed without any knowledge of this central reality of Jesus Christ, this knowledge which we simply take for granted. ‘This mystery that has now been revealed through the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets was unknown to any men in past generations.’ For most of its history, the human race did not have this guiding star.
 
Despite the preaching of the Gospel in every part of the world, many people remain still untouched by the revelation of the mystery. And even in parts of the world like our own which have been labelled as ‘Christian’, there are now many who are effectively untouched by any ‘knowledge of the mystery’ of Christ. It is still possible to say in our own day, ‘Night still covers the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.’ One traditional Christian response to this is simply to see the world as in the power of the ‘Prince of Darkness’, in the power of the Devil. There is certainly an important truth in this view, reflected very widely in Scripture. But it is not the whole story, either in Scripture or in fact.
 
    
 
The story of the Magi can be seen as a story of the Quest upon which the human race has always been engaged. The journey of the Magi is the human journey; the journey of the exploration of our environment, the exploration of the universe. It is the journey of the search for truth, and what that might mean. It is the journey in response to beauty, and the journey fuelled by that strange longing we have for fulfilment. It is the journey on which humanity wrestles with issues of good and evil; the journey on which humanity wrestles with issues of suffering, and with what might be meant by justice. That sense of justice is there in today’s psalm - ‘He shall save the poor when they cry, and the needy who are helpless. He will have pity on the weak, and save the lives of the poor.’  That longing for justice, such a feature of the Old Testament, may have been rare elsewhere, but was it entirely confined to the Jews?
 
Night still covers the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.  But all sorts of people, of every nation and language, of every faith and none, are on the journey of exploration of these fundamental human issues. What we celebrate today, as we remember the journey of the Magi, is not a set of neat answers as the conclusion of this human journey; a set of answers which simply say ‘we are right and you are wrong’. What we celebrate today is not another division of the human race into the children of light and the children of darkness. At the centre of this story is not a theory or a doctrine, although there is a place for both. At the centre of this story is a Child, a Person. At the centre of the story is what St Paul so rightly calls ‘the mystery of Christ’ – the mystery of Christ which does in fact hold the key to the endless human quest and journey. It holds the key not by providing neat answers, for questions remain, and the human struggle to understand continues. It holds the key by being the ultimate point of reference, the revelation of the mystery through which God, the ultimate mystery, is disclosed to eyes that can see.
 
This Child is inevitably disturbing of human arrangements which take no account of the ultimate mystery of God. The disturbance which afflicted King Herod touches many people in our own day. But we are here today because we seek to take account of that mystery. In Eliot’s poem, the old Wise Man asks himself, ‘Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?’ The ultimate mystery of God has been revealed so far as we can grasp it in Birth and in Death. Indeed in re-birth beyond death.  As we seek to align our lives on the focal point of that Birth and that Death, in the end there is only one possible response. As with the Magi, the Wise Men, the Three Kings, before this ultimate mystery, disclosed in this Child, the only response is worship.        

CHRISTMAS 2011

The approach to Christmas this year has been dominated for me by a single image. It is the image of the little town of Bethlehem as it is today, virtually imprisoned behind a high concrete wall. Those who watched the film ‘Bethlehem Hidden from View’ shown after Mass during Advent will not be surprised by this. Readers of the Kennington Chronicle will also be aware of this ‘wall of separation’. In the film, not only Christians, but Jews as well, plead that we use every means to get this illegal and dehumanising wall pulled down – a wall built by the Israeli government for no other purpose than to keep Palestinians away from Israeli settlers on Palestinian land.
 
It may seem rather shocking to begin a homily on this feast of Christmas by referring to so political a matter. But at Christmas we are not celebrating a sanitised fairy-tale, we are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ; we are celebrating a real birth in a real place within our world. The present state of that very special place, the ‘little town of Bethlehem’, is surely therefore our concern. And behind the inspiring and familiar words of Sacred Scripture which we hear at Mass on this feast, there also lurk some equally harsh political realities. The prophetic words of Isaiah which are so familiar at this season were proclaimed in the face of the insatiable aggressiveness of the Assyrian empire. It was to a people in the misery of exile that Isaiah continued to assert the ultimate kingship of God. And St Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus begins with Caesar Augustus; it begins with the apparent dominance over the whole world of the Roman Emperor. Christmas, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in the real world. It belongs in the world of struggling peoples and dictatorial power; the world of financial turmoil; the world of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’; and, on the smaller scale, the world where neighbours separate themselves from each other not by concrete walls but by impenetrable hedges; a world where families are divided, a world where hearts grow hard.
 
This is the world into which was born the Saviour, the Saviour who is Christ the Lord. This is the dark world into which a light has shone – the radiant light of God’s glory; a light which no darkness can overpower. However dark the world may seem, that is why we can still celebrate this feast with joy. The joyful news which we announce, and which we celebrate, is the good news of the coming into our world of a light which no darkness can overpower.
 
As I have lived with this image of the concrete wall over the past few weeks, it has also taken on another dimension. I have come to see it also as another sort of barrier. I have come to see it as the image of a barrier we have built in our minds which imprisons us within the limits of our material universe.
 
 It has long been clear to those who have thought deeply about it that there is no fundamental contradiction between the attempt by science to understand the workings of the material world, and the understanding that same world as God’s creation. But the dominant spirit of our age is a materialist one. It believes that this material world is all that there is. It believes that the world is a closed system. ‘Spirituality’ is a word now in common use, but frequently it simply refers to an emotional and subjective aspect of human experience. As a person of faith, I find that I have to do battle within myself with these dominant modern attitudes; believers are not simply insulated from the spirit of the age. On a radio programme last Monday, it was suggested that Christian values of love and compassion were inevitably fighting a losing battle with the natural and aggressive survival instincts of human beings. Research reported in a recent issue of the New Scientist concluded that human beings were natural cheats; that they were inevitably corrupt. So here we are, a pretty unpleasant race of beings locked into the prison of our material world. It may be a generously proportioned world. Unlike the little town of Bethlehem, it may be a generously proportioned prison, but prison it is. It is, so the current world-view declares, all that there is.
 
We celebrate today our liberation from that prison. Our world is not a closed material prison, despite the walls we have come to erect around it. We have erected them in part by our refusal to listen properly to the truth revealed even in whole areas of our ordinary human experience. But at this season we listen also to the evangelist John; we hear again that our world is a world created through the agency of the Word of God, the Word who was with God in the beginning. Our world, however dark it may at times seem, is in the hands of God – God who is the source of life and light. We celebrate today our liberation from a closed prison by God; our liberation by God who has himself leapt over the barrier in order to be alongside us where we are, and so to demolish the barrier and restore us to that relationship with God for which we were created. ‘The Word was made flesh and lived among us’. This was not just some vague spiritual intervention. This was and is God revealing himself in and through flesh; in and through matter; in and through the humanity which he has himself created. Self-seeking and corruption is rife, but it is not the last word. The last word belongs to God – to God the Creator; to God the Saviour and Redeemer.
 
‘To all who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God.’ Or, as St Paul wrote to Titus, ‘Jesus Christ gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own.’ To live in the light of Christmas is to have a completely different world-view. We live as Christians in a world which is a material world, a world of flesh and blood, but a world which we know not to be closed, but open. It is open to the God who both creates and saves; open to the God who creates and saves because he loves, and loves enough to leap the barrier; loves enough to give himself for us. We live in the same world as the atheist or agnostic, but in the light of the one ‘born for us today’. In the light of God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ, we have to learn to take a ‘God’s-eye view’.
 
To take a God’s-eye view requires practice. ‘Grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.’ Without that grace, without that truth, we are helpless. But we have to practice being open to that grace, open to that truth, on a daily basis. Otherwise the default world-view of our contemporaries will re-assert itself. That is the point of the disciplines of Mass and of daily prayer that the Church enjoins on us. Not just to discipline us, but because without such daily openness to the grace and truth of God, the good news which as followers of Jesus Christ we all represent will remain unheard. If, by that grace and truth, Jesus Christ has made us a people of his own, both the Psalmist and the angels declare that this is not just for our benefit. ‘All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God’. ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.’

3rd SUNDAY of ADVENT, Year ‘B’ (2011)

Today is ‘Gaudete Sunday’. The theme which runs through the Mass today is the theme of rejoicing, of joy. We are called to rejoice because of the joy of salvation. The Entrance Antiphon which gives the Sunday its name is from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice. Indeed, the Lord is near.’
 
 This theme is picked up again by the Collect, the Opening Prayer. I have said from time to time that one of the good things about the new translation of the Mass is that the richness of the Latin Collects will be more evident. Today is an example. ‘O God, you see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity.’ As usual, the prayer begins by addressing God, but rather charmingly pictures God looking down on us as we are preparing for Christmas – and preparing not just with frantic activity, but faithfully; that is, keeping our eyes on what it is all really about – the celebration of the birth of the Saviour. It then goes on to pray that we may be enabled to attain the joys of so great a salvation. It looks forward, as does the season of Advent, to the joy of our final salvation; to the joy of the fulfilment of God’s ultimate good purposes for his world and for the human race. And then it focuses back on what we are doing here and now. ‘May we celebrate (both the birth of the Saviour and our ultimate salvation) with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.’ ‘Gaudete.’ ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.’
 
The theme of joy is picked up again by the prophet Isaiah in the First Reading. ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me… he has sent me to bring good news to the poor… I exult for joy in the Lord, my soul rejoices in my God, for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.’ And we have responded to Isaiah’s prophecy with the words of Mary in the Magnificat: ‘My soul rejoices in my God’. ‘My soul glorifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.’ Mary’s joy, and our joy, has one clear focus – it is joy in God the Saviour; it is joy because of our salvation.
 
Joy is very different from happiness. Happiness can be very superficial; pubs, for example, often advertise a ‘happy hour’. We would, I think, find it extremely odd if they started advertising ‘an hour of joy’. And there is a famous poem by Wordsworth which begins ‘Surprised by joy’. Joy is not something you can just turn on at will. As an emotion, it generally comes as a surprise. But, unlike happiness, when joy does surprise us, it seems to put us in touch with something much deeper. We may not identify this with ‘the joy of salvation’, but at least it is an experience of ‘integration’. The experience of joy puts us in touch with a place where things come together; where life has a wholeness and rightness about it. Every experience of joy may not be an experience of the joy of salvation as such. Rather, perhaps, you could say that as in the Gospel John the Baptist is a witness, a pointer to Christ, so every experience of joy is a pointer in the direction of salvation.
 
So it is particularly unfortunate that we are told in the Second Reading to ‘be happy at all times’. When, in some years time, we get our new lectionary, taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, we will no longer be told ‘to be happy at all times’, but rather to ‘Rejoice always’. ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’
 
‘This is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’ God’s purpose for us in Christ Jesus is that we should be always rejoicing, always praying, always giving thanks – always, indeed, in every circumstance, ‘making eucharist’. It seems a rather tall order. How could I possibly be asked to be like that, to do those things, all the time? Or even ‘in every circumstance’?  The answer is that in my natural state, so to speak, I couldn’t possibly. St Paul isn’t just saying ‘this is how God expects you to behave’. He is saying ‘this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’. There is a lovely moment in St Luke’s gospel, when the disciples return from their preaching mission, and Jesus has a vision of God’s victory over evil. St Luke records that Jesus, ‘just at this time, was filled with joy by the Holy Spirit’. And indeed it leads him into a prayer of thanksgiving. We hardly need to be reminded of the constancy of the prayer of Jesus. Those nights he went off to pray alone are surely an indication of that relationship of prayerful communion with the Father which underlay every moment of his life. And it surfaces also at moments of tension and struggle, as in the garden of Gethsemane. ‘Let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, Father, let your will, not mine be done.’ Earnest prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom underlies every moment of the life of Jesus.
 
And as that underlying joy and constant prayer were a foundation to the whole life of Jesus, so was thanksgiving; thanksgiving in all circumstances. We should be reminded of this every time we come to Mass. Not only because the very word ‘Eucharist’ means thanksgiving. Also because we are taken at every Mass to the brink of the Passion of Jesus. We are usually more aware, perhaps, of the Body and Blood of Jesus as that sacrament which unites us to him and nourishes us with his risen life. Naturally enough it usually takes us, as it were, to a more comfortable ‘Easter’ place. But if you imagine Jesus at the Last Supper, when he gave us the Eucharist, he is staring the horrific events of Good Friday in the face. And yet he is able to give thanks. ‘He himself took bread, and giving you thanks, he said the blessing…’. ‘In a similar way…he took the chalice, and giving you thanks, he said the blessing…’.
 
 ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’  If we are to share in this joy; if we are to share in this constant prayerful longing for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven; if we are to be able to give thanks in all circumstances, it will only be because we are ‘in Christ Jesus’. It can only be insofar as we have not only been baptised into Christ Jesus, but have actually begun to share the perspective on life and on the world which is the perspective of Christ Jesus. It can only be, as St Paul says elsewhere, insofar as we have ‘put on the mind of Christ’.  That is, of course, the work of a lifetime. But it is also the fundamental purpose of our annual celebration of the key moments in the story of God’s saving work; it is the fundamental purpose of our listening to Sacred Scripture; it is the fundamental purpose of our confession of those things in our lives which do not accord with the mind of Christ, so that when we come to Holy Communion we may receive not only the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, but as St Thomas Aquinas prays, ‘not only the sacrament, but also the reality and power of the sacrament.’
 
Jesus saw the vision of a world redeemed, and rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.  In Christ, our salvation has been achieved. ‘God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself.’ Those are the wonderful words we hear when we come humbly to receive God’s forgiveness in preparation for the festival. ‘Gaudete.’ ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, ‘Rejoice’. 

2nd SUNDAY of ADVENT (Year ‘B’) 2011

Last Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, we began a new year for the Church. At present the Church offers us a three-year cycle of readings, with a different Gospel as the focus of each year. So this year Gospel readings are mainly from St Mark. But on this, the Second Sunday of Advent, and next Sunday, the Third Sunday, in each of the three years, John the Baptist is a central figure. Broadly speaking, the emphasis this Sunday is on the message of John the Baptist. The key text is ‘Prepare a way for the Lord.’ On the Third Sunday the emphasis is more on the contrast between John the Baptist and Jesus. ‘I am not the Christ’. John, as in a sense he always does, points away from himself to Jesus. However, this Sunday St Mark puts that contrast between Jesus and John very succinctly. John first emphasises his own humble status in relation to the One who is to come. But then he simply says, ‘I have baptised you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’
 
What does John mean by this contrast between ‘water baptism’ and ‘baptism with the Holy Spirit’? It would, I think, be quite easy to misunderstand it completely. It would be easy to hear it in the context of our experience of ‘baptism with water’. After all, even if we don’t remember our own baptism, most of us will have been present at a ‘baptism with water’, indeed probably several, and most of these will have been baptisms of babies. These are usually delightful family occasions, in which the focus is on the child, and the most dramatic thing that happens is often the yell emitted by the child when the water is poured over its head. The truth of what is really happening at that moment is another story. It is to help parents to appreciate that deeper truth that we insist that before their child is baptised they attend at least a session or two of preparation. ‘Prepare a way for the Lord.’
 
And then John the Baptist speaks of the One who is to come – Jesus – as ‘baptising with the Holy Spirit’. That phrase too we can easily hear in the light of the way it is often used today. That too can lead to misunderstanding. Some of you may have had the experience which is described as being ‘baptised in the Spirit’. If you haven’t, (as I haven’t), you may have heard it spoken about. It refers to an experience which some Christians have had of a sudden deeper conversion. Probably they were baptised as babies, and perhaps have always gone to church, or even lapsed from church. Then, suddenly, God becomes intensely real to them; their hearts are deeply moved by Jesus Christ; their lives are transformed; they see the whole world in a new light. If you have had an experience like that, you naturally want others to have it too. But not every faithful disciple of Jesus Christ is led that way. The mistake is sometimes made of supposing that only people who have had that sort of experience are ‘real Christians’.
 
John the Baptist says, ‘I have baptised you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’ If we are to understand this, we need to forget that familiar picture of the water baptism of a baby in a church. And we also need to forget, or at least not put at the centre of the stage, that very particular experience of a sudden dramatic experience of deeper conversion to God. We need to return to the key text of this Sunday: ‘Prepare a way for the Lord’.
 
At this point I am making life rather difficult for myself. Because this ought really to be next Sunday’s homily. The First Reading next Sunday begins ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for the Lord has anointed me.’ It is the passage from the prophet Isaiah which Jesus quotes at the very beginning of his ministry in St Luke’s Gospel. Indeed the spirit of the Lord, the Holy Spirit of God, was seen as descending upon Jesus at his baptism in the river Jordan. The Holy Spirit descended on Jesus from the Father, and the voice of the Father was heard, ‘This is my beloved Son’.  The whole life and ministry of Jesus is the life of One upon whom the Holy Spirit of God rested, and indeed rests; that whole life of teaching and preaching and healing, culminating in his Passion and death on the Cross; that life and death crowned and vindicated by his Resurrection from the dead and Ascension to the Father. In all of that, the Holy Spirit of God rested on Jesus.  The Holy Spirit of God who moved over the chaos in the original creation of the world reveals Jesus to be the beginning and heart of God’s new creation. In and through Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, God is redeeming the world, saving the world, making the world new.
 
That is the proper context for those words of John the Baptist, ‘One is coming who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit’. It isn’t about a particular dramatic spiritual experience, although that may for some be part of the journey. It is about the fact that through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God is bringing about what St Peter describes as ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.  God’s Holy Spirit is poured out upon Jesus; through Jesus, risen and glorified, the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon the Church which is his Body;  poured out upon the Church born from the water and blood which flowed from his side on the Cross; the Church born from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. That water flowing from the side of Jesus represents Christian baptism. our ‘water baptism’ is not what John’s ‘water baptism’ was. Our water baptism, even of a little child, is baptism into Jesus Christ, baptism into the One who was to come, baptism into the One who was and is the beginning of God’s new creation. Our calling, through our baptism, through our union and communion with Jesus Christ, is to be agents with him of that new creation; co-creators of a new heaven and a new earth in the power of the Holy Spirit.
 
That is the vocation of each one of us here, whom God seeks to use, often in humble and hidden ways, in this great task of building his Kingdom. So what about John’s water baptism? ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’. It was a baptism of preparation, a baptism of repentance. John’s water baptism prepared the way of the Lord who has now come. But that work of preparation remains constantly necessary for us if we are to respond to the coming of the Lord to us, and so to the vocation to which he calls us. Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury once shocked an interviewer who asked him how long he prayed each day. ‘About two minutes’, he said. There was a pause. Then he added, ‘but I spend about fifty-eight minutes preparing for it.’ St Ignatius of Loyola has many good things to say about preparing for prayer. Immediately before prayer, he suggests, ‘stand for a moment before the place where you are to pray, and consider how God our Lord beholds you. Then make an act of reverence.’  The Lord comes in prayer; the Lord comes to us in Holy Communion. We will be much more aware of the riches of this gift if we take a little time to prepare for it, to consider in advance what we will be doing, and who we are to whom the Lord comes in this wonderful way. And this whole Advent season is a preparation. It is a preparation both for that ultimate coming of the Lord, and for the coming of the Lord at Christmas. ‘Make a straight highway for our God across the desert. Let every valley be filled in, and every mountain and hill be laid low.’  As before Christmas opportunities are offered for the sacrament of Reconciliation, perhaps that text could help us prepare? We can ask ourselves not just what are our officially labelled sins. We can ask ourselves too where are the valleys, the gaps; where are the obstacles which get in the way of the God who in Jesus has come alongside us in our humanity, and still seeks, in his very personal love, to make a straight path to me? ‘I have baptised you with water, but One is coming who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’ ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’ 

1st SUNDAY of ADVENT, Year ‘B’ (2011)

‘The writing is on the wall.’ Everyone knows what that proverbial phrase means. Those who are familiar with the daily Mass readings will have been reminded in the past week where it comes from. The same is true of another familiar proverbial phrase, ‘feet of clay’. Both come from those wonderful passages from the Book of Daniel which have been the First Readings at Mass over the past week. I hope that another of this week’s stories, Daniel in the lion’s den, is still familiar to children – and not only to children. But the writing on the wall comes from the story of Belshazzar’s Feast. The disembodied hand writes those mysterious words which Daniel interprets for the king, ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting’; ‘God has measured your sovereignty and put an end to it.’ And ‘feet of clay’, too. The king dreams of a statue with a head of gold and feet of clay. The clay crumbles, and the whole statue shatters into dust. Again, ‘the writing is on the wall’. His kingdom is about to come to an end.
 
Those are among the readings the Church gave us as we approached the season of Advent, that season which we enter today. And as they were read, I couldn’t help feeling how extraordinarily they reflected the background this year to our entry into the Advent season. Syria is in agony, and its rulers likely to be overthrown. Egypt is once again in turmoil; the whole future of the Middle East looks extremely unpredictable. And for Europe, the writing is on the wall. The Governor of the Bank of England says he can’t predict events from one day to the next. The Chinese, it would appear, don’t see why they should help, and very understandably. We have had our good times, and we haven’t always been very helpful to them, to say the least. Why should they bail us out now? Plunged in debt, the whole financial system is being challenged. At this point we all need to work together, but in a grotesquely unequal society many of those at the lower end are on the point of taking strike action. We enter this season of Advent in a climate of great uncertainty and possibly of danger.
 
So what, for us, is the Advent response? One response is to be found in that very rich first reading from Isaiah. ‘Oh, that you would tear the heavens open and come down!’ We normally hear those words, perhaps, in the light of Christmas, that very gentle and initially almost invisible tearing open of the heavens. But it is really a much more desperate cry. ‘Oh that you would tear the heavens open and come down – at your Presence the mountains would melt.’ This is a desperate cry for the Advent of God in power to rescue us from the mess we have made. ‘O God, we can’t handle it any more; you sort it out for us – or perhaps just wrap up the whole thing.’
 
That cry stands out because it is in fact at odds with the rest of the passage from Isaiah. And certainly that despairing cry gets no support either from the Gospel, or from St Paul in the Second Reading. There are passages in the Gospels and elsewhere which seem to paint a picture of a dramatic end to the world, but there is little reference to this in the Advent readings. Today the closest we get to it is in the Collect – the Opening Prayer. ‘Grant your faithful, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ at his coming, so that gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.’ Yes, we believe that Christ will come again. We live every moment of our lives under the ultimate judgement of God. That is an immensely important Advent theme. But its importance lies not in what may happen at some point in the future, but in the perspective it gives us as we live today. And it is to today that the Gospel speaks. In the midst of today’s turmoil and uncertainty, Jesus does not ask us to contemplate the end of the world, or to pray for a dramatic rescue bid by God, but in this present time to ‘stay awake!’
 
What does it mean to ‘stay awake’? Today’s Second Reading is the beginning of St Paul’s First Letter to the Church in Corinth. If you read on a bit, it becomes clear that the Church in Corinth, like the Church in so many times and places including are own, was a Church in a mess. But before he gets involved in the mess, St Paul makes some foundational statements, and makes them in a spirit of profound thanksgiving. God is faithful. You are not without the gifts of the Holy Spirit. God is faithful, and by calling you has joined you to his Son, Jesus Christ. Yes, there is a journey to be travelled. Yes, the fullness of God’s heavenly kingdom has not yet been revealed. But whatever the mess, whatever the turmoil, whether in the Church or in the wider world, God is faithful, and God has joined you to his Son, Jesus Christ. It is to wake ourselves up to that foundational truth that we are celebrating the Eucharist together here today.
 
God is faithful. ‘You, Lord, yourself are our Father; our Redeemer is your ancient name’. Isaiah rests on the same foundation as St Paul does, as we do. And we so much more securely, because of Jesus Christ. But what have we built on that foundation? No, we have not always stayed awake. ‘Why, Lord, leave us to stray from your ways, and harden our hearts against fearing you?’ ‘We have all withered like leaves and our sins blew us away like the wind.’ As far as our present financial crisis is concerned, surely we can see now that it is something we have been sleep-walking into. It is a people whose hearts were in an important sense hardened against God who have allowed themselves to be so misled. And we are all part of that people. And could there be a better image for our present state than ‘withered leaves blown away by the wind’? ‘No one invoked your name or roused himself to catch hold of you. For you hid your face from us and gave us up to the power of our sins.’
 
God seemed to hide, for we were asleep. ‘But’, says the prophet, ‘you guide those who act with integrity and keep your ways in mind.’ God does not sleep; it is we who sleep. God does not tear the heavens to come and rescue us when we are in a mess; nor does God tear the heavens and come to destroy us. God is faithful, and God redeems us by joining us to his Son.  God redeems us by, in his Son, joining us. Thus, as a potter, he reshapes our clay. Isaiah’s prophecy, apart from that one despairing prayer that God should come crashing in, has an alternating rhythm which mirrors a pattern of life which is perhaps familiar. There is the time of being closed to God; the time when God seems to be absent. There is the desire to open up to God again; the memory of that story of God’s faithfulness, a nostalgia for that story culminating in Jesus the Lord which the Church constantly retells in her worship. There is that time of dryness, sometimes the result of a sinful attitude, sometimes a test of our faithfulness: we are like withered leaves. But through it all, God remains faithful; our Father is the potter, we are the clay. Amid the crumbling kingdoms, Daniel perceived a world in the hands of a judging but also a redeeming God. In Advent we are called to ‘Stay awake!’. Awake to the coming of the God who meets us exactly where we are; awake to the touch of the Potter, who through it all is fashioning us, fashioning humanity, into the image of Jesus his Son.   

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