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Fr Andrew's Homilies
6th Sunday of Easter (C) 5th
May 2013
Set your minds (set your affections) on
things that are above, not on things that are on
earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with
Christ in God. Colossians 3:2-3
AT THE head
of every set of readings in my Sunday Missal is a
helpful paragraph, explaining what we are in for
this week. All the different publishers seem
to do it. The Sunday Missal of forty years ago
went so far as to give each Sunday a theme, as if
the readings were a kind of Sunday School class.
It was the same in the Church of England.
Today, I remember, was called ‘Going to the Father’.
That fits nicely with today’s Gospel, ‘you would
have rejoiced, because I go to the Father’ and
points to the Ascension, which we celebrate next.
But nowadays we realise that nothing can be pinned
down to one theme or paragraph. The readings
at Mass are not simply religious instruction –
though that is one thing that happens – but other
things too. The evangelical clergyman, W H
Vanstone, in his great book, Love’s Endeavour,
Love’s Expense, remarks that the task of a preacher
and a sermon is primarily doxological, that is, to
give glory to God, not to instruct the congregation.
My own view is that we can pile up the benefits
of studying the Scriptures and listening to sermons.
Certainly there is a strong element of doxology,
doing all this, as Bach wrote on his manuscripts, ad
maiorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God.
Certainly also there is an element of instruction.
But I think there is a third element too, what one
might call the ‘affective’, that is, to do with our
‘affections’. There are emotions and
feelings that we need to learn to explore.
Lectio divina, as defined by Wikipædia, is ‘a
traditional
Benedictine practice of scriptural reading,
meditation and prayer, intended to promote communion
with God and to increase the knowledge of
God's Word. It does not treat Scripture as
texts to be studied, but as the
Living Word.’ It is this way of reading –
affective engagement, engaging the affections –
which we automatically do to some extent, but
probably not nearly enough. To give you a
couple of examples, you can hardly hear the story of
the angels at Bethlehem without experiencing deep
emotions – about childhood, about Christmas, about
universal Peace. You can hardly hear the story
of the meeting of the Risen Christ with St Mary
Magdalene on the first Easter Day without a rush of
feeling arising from the fragrance of the meeting.
A very simple example of ‘affective’ meditation
is the passage from Pope Emeritus Benedict at the
top of today’s readings in the CTS New Sunday
Missal. ‘Whoever loves me will keep my word,
and my Father will love him, and we will come to him
and make our home with him’, says Pope Benedict, is
‘an implicit spiritual portrait of the Virgin Mary’.
These words, he says, ‘are addressed to the
disciples but can be applied to a maximum degree
precisely to the One who was the first and perfect
disciple of Jesus’. And that is a good
thought for this month of May, the month of Mary.
He goes on to say, Mary showed that she loved her
Son ‘not only as a mother, but first of all as a
humble and obedient handmaid. For this reason
God the Father loved her and the Most Holy Trinity
made its dwelling-place in her’. I don’t
know about you, but, for me, that makes me think
affectively, it engages my affections, the right
hand side of my brain.
No Sunday’s readings
can be reduced to a paragraph, still less to one
theme, so I want to say something else about ‘Going
to the Father’, which, as I said, is broadly where
we are on the Sunday before Ascension. And my
reflection is this. It is about keeping going,
living and dying, journeying on – trudging through
the Wilderness – and arriving in the Promised Land,
the land of milk and honey. It is the Passover
experience, the Pasch. We start off in bondage
in Egypt – as the story of the Hebrews tells us –
and, after the plagues and the slaughter of the
Passover Lamb, we finally arrive in the Promised
Land. Some of us can remember the bondage – an
ill-spent youth, a period of addiction – but most of
us here can remember only the Wilderness, keeping
going. As Christians we turn the Exodus into
‘Onward Christian soldiers’, and battle on,
sometimes discouraged, sometimes heartened. We
identify all too readily with those crisis moments
when the Israelites were dying of hunger, fainting
with thirst, plagued by serpents, and, with our
affections, we can identify with the despair of
those moments. We also take delight in the
manna and the quails, the water from the Rock, the
bronze serpent, set up as a standard in battle, the
crucifix on the Rood Screen. But there are
times when we can’t see beyond that – and, because
we can never see beyond, there are times when we are
not even sure that there is a ‘beyond’.
All of this is in the phrase ‘Going to the Father’.
Jesus has gone ahead to prepare a place for us.
However disheartened we get, whether we believe it
or not as we journey on, there is a place for us.
And so, a couple of quotations which certainly get
my emotions going. The first, from the Letter
to the Colossians, is my favourite Easter text – not
least because it was hauntingly set by Orlando
Gibbons, and I took a phrase from it as a text:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the
things that are above, where Christ is, seated at
the right hand of God. Set your minds (set your
affections) on things that are above, not on things
that are on earth. For you have died, and your life
is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is
our life appears, then you also will appear with him
in glory.
The second is from the Preface at
Mass today. Listen out for the phrases
‘children of light’ ‘rise to eternal life’ ‘halls of
the heavenly Kingdom thrown open’:
It is truly
right and just, our duty and our salvation, at all
times to acclaim you, O Lord, but in this time above
all to laud you yet more gloriously, when Christ our
Passover has been sacrificed. Through him the
children of light rise to eternal life and the halls
of the heavenly Kingdom are thrown open to the
faithful; for his Death is our ransom from death,
and in his rising the life of all has risen.
4th Sunday of Easter (C)
I and the Father are one. John 10:30
IN
EXODUS chapter 3, as Moses is keeping the flock of
his father-in-law, Jethro, God reveals himself to
Moses ‘in a flame of fire out of the midst of a
bush’. God says to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And
he says to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel,
“I AM has sent me to you”,’ (v. 14). We need
to keep in our minds several things here. For
one thing, Moses is serving as a shepherd. For
another, God reveals himself in a burning bush, a
bush not consumed by the fire – a present moment,
not a moment where something starts and finishes.
Third, God tells Moses his Name: I AM WHO I AM.
God is entirely in the present. He has no
history, no beginning. He has no future, no
ending. He is the Eternal Present.
Fourth, God reveals himself to send Moses on a
mission: ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “I
AM has sent me to you”.’
If we are going
to begin to understand the significance of this
incident, we have to remember all these four things.
Let’s put them in a slightly different order, as you
do with the Lottery balls on a Saturday night.
God chooses to reveal himself. There is no
need for him to do so. The whole universe
could function without us ever discovering anything
about God, who he is and what he does. And, in
fact, some people do think that the whole thing
happens without God. Second, God reveals
himself as the Eternal Present, I AM WHO I AM.
That is the Name he gives himself. It is
the Sacred Name, and in its Hebrew form, as in the
Jerusalem Bible not for reading aloud, it is a Name
which is it is forbidden to utter aloud in Hebrew
and Catholic worship. In fact, in the Hebrew
Bible, the vowels used are those of another word, so
that whenever the Sacred Name appears in the
scrolls, the reader says Adonaï instead. The
Sacred Name has four consonants – Yod, He, Waw and
He, or, as we would say, Y, H, W, H. This
tetragrammaton – these four letters – are translated
as LORD in the English Bible and Lectionary, and, to
indicate the tetragrammaton, the word LORD is given
with the four capital letters.
We need to
understand all that if we are going to understand
the significance of what Jesus says about himself in
St John’s Gospel. On this Good Shepherd Sunday
- and, remember, God revealed himself to Moses
whilst he was watching over the sheep, and, for that
matter, the angels of Bethlehem announced the coming
of Jesus ‘while shepherds watched their flocks by
night’ – we think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd.
As our Alleluia verse tells us, ‘I AM the good
shepherd, says the Lord: I know my own sheep and my
own know me’. But the mention of shepherds and
sheep should not distract us from the most important
thing in the sentence. Jesus says, ‘I AM’.
We are encountering God himself. It is God
himself who is speaking. Jesus is Emmanuel,
God-with-us. The Risen Lord, in our midst, is
God himself in our midst.
And it is in St John’s
Gospel that we discover most not only about Jesus
but about God. This is clear from the verse we
began with, the last verse of today’s Gospel (John
10:30): ‘I and the Father are one’, says Jesus.
This is not the first time we come across this.
There are a several places in St John’s Gospel where
Jesus tells us this in other words. For
example, (John 8:58) Jesus says this to the Jewish
leaders: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham
was, I AM’. Calling himself by the Divine Name was
blasphemy, in their view, and the religious
authorities ‘took up stones to throw at him’, to
stone him to death but he hid himself. And
then (John 14), answering the very modern-sounding
religious doubts of Philip – ‘Lord, show us the
Father, and we shall be satisfied’ – Jesus says,
‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not
know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen
the Father; how can you say, “Show us the Father?”
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the
Father is in me?’
And, of course, we discover
exactly who Jesus is in the very first verse of St
John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
And so it should not be too much of a surprise to
discover Jesus calling himself ‘I AM’. The
Methodist scholar, Margaret Barker, goes further and
suggests that whenever we meet God in the Old
Testament – Moses at the Burning Bush for example –
the One whom we meet is Jesus, the Second Person of
the Trinity. As she sees it, God the Father is
One whom we never meet, except through Jesus.
No wonder Cardinal Schönborn describes him, in a
book with the title ‘The Human Face of God’.
In
Hebrew thought, seven is the perfect number – and so
it is no surprise to discover in St John’s Gospel
that there are seven discourses in which Jesus
describes himself as ‘I AM��. ‘I AM the bread
of life’ John 6:35. ‘I AM the light of the
world’ John 8:12. ‘I AM the door [of the sheepfold]’
John 10:9. ‘ I AM the good shepherd’
John 10:11. ‘I AM the resurrection and the
life’ John 11:25. ‘I AM the way, and the
truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, but
by me’ John 14:6. ‘I AM the true vine, and my Father
is the vinedresser’ John 15:1.
On Good Shepherd
Sunday, we focus on the image of the Shepherd, on
pastoral work (the work of the shepherd), on
vocations to the priesthood, and on how ideas of the
shepherd and his sheep and the flock gathering for
pasture (the congregation), permeate the Bible.
And all that is important. Most important of all,
though, is for us to understand that Jesus the
Risen Lord is the Eternal Word, the Eternal Present,
and that, in him, we encounter God Himself, for as
Jesus himself says, I and the Father are one.
That is Whom we meet, the One who condescends to be
consumed, in the Blessed Sacrament, in Holy
Communion.
3rd Sunday of Easter (C)
Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘…do you love me more
than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know
that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’
A second time he said to him, ‘…do you love me?’ He
said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’
He said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to
him the third time, ‘… do you love me?’ Peter was
grieved …and… said to him, ‘Lord, you know
everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to
him, ‘Feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to
you, when you were young, you girded yourself and
walked where you would; but when you are old, you
will stretch out your hands, and another will gird
you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ …
And after this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’
John 21
ST JOHN’S GOSPEL has had a huge variety
of interpretations. It is very different from
the other three gospels – the scene, the stories,
the style – leading some commentators to conclude
that, sublime though its theology is, it isn’t very
reliable as a historical document. Other
commentators have taken exactly the opposite view:
in all kinds of detail, they say, St John puts us
right, historically, where others are not quite
right. An example is the events of Holy Week,
where Matthew, Mark and Luke have the Lord eating
the Passover meal – the Last Supper - with the
disciples, whereas John puts the meal the night
before the Passover so that, as the Lord dies on the
cross, the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in
the Temple. The Church here follows John’s
Gospel.
In the Resurrection account in John 21,
those of us who are looking out for symbolism will
notice that seven of the disciples are involved –
and seven of course is a holy number – and that,
when they are persuaded to catch fish, the disciples
catch 153, representing all the species of fish in
the known world. These fishers of men – once
they break away from their rather dispirited return
to work as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee – will be
on a mission to all nations, to all species of
mankind in the known world.
And - more
symbolism - we notice that Simon Peter, the leader
of the merry band, is three times challenged by
Jesus to say whether he truly loves him. He is
commissioned to Feed my lambs. Tend my
sheep. Feed my sheep. The threefold
affirmation of love exactly matches up the threefold
denial before the cock crew. The leader of the
apostolic band, who deserted Jesus when he was
arrested and, when he crept back to see what had
happened, denied even knowing him, is now
three-times invited to express his love and his
commitment. More than that, far from as
when he was young, girding himself and walking where
he would, in old age, says Jesus, ‘another will gird
you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’
There won’t be any running away at that point,
though the film Quo vadis? imagines Peter escaping
from persecution in Rome. As he leaves, he meets
Jesus who is travelling into Rome to die again.
Shamed once more, Peter goes back to the Imperial
City to face crucifixion.
Some of us
have been watching Fr Robert Barron’s excellent
series Catholicism – we’re halfway through - and I
hope that, before the Year of Faith is out, there
will be chance for more of you to watch it.
The production values are outstanding. There
is a memorable point when we find ourselves in St
Peter’s Square - the Pope on the balcony and the
crowds below - when Fr Barron tellingly contrasts
the long-gone glory of Ancient Rome, and the
Emperors, with the vitality of the Catholic Church
under the successors of Peter. Weakness
triumphs over strength. Love over military
might. Service over subjection.
Since
that DVD came out, we have had a change of Pope, a
change of Peter. There is wild speculation
about what we are in for. Some of the media
seem to suggest that Pope Francis will be
progressive in all sorts of ways. Others take
a different view: one cartoon said, ‘The first
Jesuit Pope: the first Latin American Pope: the
266th conservative Pope’. We just don’t know.
But there are some themes emerging. I
was reading this week about the proceedings of the
Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin
America and the Caribbean in Brazil, in 2007, which
was headed up by the then Cardinal Bergoglio, now
Pope Francis. One archbishop who served with him
there saw him ‘as a serene man, solid, serious in
his work, a man who went to the heart of the
matter.’ Another identified three themes in that
conference which have already emerged in Pope
Francis’ homilies: ‘the personal encounter
with Christ, the option for the poor, and
stewardship of creation’.
These three themes
are at the heart of the matter. ‘The personal
encounter with Christ’ is everything for us.
It is why we come to Mass, rather than just learn
about the Faith from books and on the internet.
It is at Mass that we meet him, just as the
disciples ate with the Risen Christ on the shore of
Galilee. We meet him together, in the
sacrament, and in each other. ‘The option for
the poor’ reminds us that we have a duty not just to
the poor ‘out there’ –in other countries – but we
have a duty towards those who live nearby and in our
midst. And ‘the stewardship of creation’ is
there, right at the beginning of the Bible, when God
entrusts us with all he has made.
In
the Popes of recent years we have received some
remarkable gifts. Pope John Paul I, whose
simplicity and kindness will be remembered for a
long, long time, despite the shortness of his time
as pope – barely a month. Pope John Paul II,
the philosopher pope, whose global ministry included
not least the ending of the Cold War. Pope
Benedict, whose towering intellect and passion for
the restoration of the Liturgy have given us a
library of ideas and a renewal of beauty and music.
Now Pope Francis who has reminded an iconic age of
what it was that St Francis of Assisi gave to the
Church, well summed up by the phrase ‘the personal
encounter with Christ, the option for the poor, and
stewardship of creation’. But we shall have to
see.
The Risen Lord concludes his charge to
Peter with two words, words which re-echo through
the centuries and challenge us – you and me – each
day, and as we gather for Mass each Sunday: ‘Follow
me’.
Easter Vigil 2013
Without having seen him you love him; though
you do not now see him you believe in him and
rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. As the
outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of
your souls. 1 Pet 1:8-9
WORDS from the
First Letter of St Peter, a letter which generally
thought to be an extended sermon on Baptism.
Here he is, addressing the first believers, those
who were not actually present at, not witnesses of,
the Resurrection but who, like us, two thousand
years later, have come to believe in the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and the
hope of eternal life and immortality, what St Peter
calls ‘the salvation of [our] souls’. We love
him without seeing him. We believe in him
without seeing him We rejoice with unutterable
and exalted joy, even though the One who fills our
hearts with gladness is One whom we have not seen.
Leaving that idea at the back of our minds, I
want us now to think about one word: ‘Remember’.
It’s a word which allows us to cross huge distances
in time. If we remember the story of Abraham,
we are remembering something that took place 4,000
years ago. If we remember looking at a fossil,
we are remembering something that existed, a long
time even before that. More often, though,
‘remembering’ is what we say about our own past
life, the days, weeks, months, or years that have
gone by. And they tell me that very old people
remember seventy or eighty years ago much more
clearly than they remember seven or eight years
earlier.
St Luke uses the word ‘remember’
at several key points in his Gospel and in the Acts
of the Apostles. Listen to it again as we
heard it in tonight’s Gospel. The angels in St
Luke’s account of the Resurrection are talking to
the women who have come to the tomb and found the
stone rolled away:
Remember how he told you,
while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man
must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and
be crucified, and on the third day rise.
‘Remember’ sometimes has an everyday, and banal,
meaning. ‘Remember to load the dishwasher
before you go to bed’. ‘Remember to buy some
more washing powder when you go to Waitrose’. But,
as St Luke uses it, ‘remember’ has a much stronger
meaning. It means ‘remember what happened
yesterday, and as you concentrate on remembering it
today, let it really change what happens tomorrow’.
The women were reminded to remember what Jesus had
told them about dying and rising again.
Remembering what he had said, as they looked at the
tomb with the stone rolled back, would change their
lives for ever. This wasn’t the tomb of a dead
man. It was the tomb of someone who had risen
from the dead, as he promised.
‘Remembering’
is at the root of the Jewish Passover. It is
also a vital dynamic of the Mass, the Christian
Passover. The Jewish Passover happens every
year, at more or less the same time as Easter.
The Jews go for the actual day of the full moon, and
the Jewish Seder this year was accordingly at the
beginning of this week. We Catholic Christians
go for the Sunday following the full moon.
Orthodox Christians, following an earlier Calendar,
usually go for a later date, a lunar month later.
As we could not help but noticing on Thursday night,
the Jewish Passover is a way of remembering that God
brought his people out from slavery in Egypt and led
them to a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey.
As Jewish people remember this, year by year, at the
Passover meal, it changes how they feel about things
and helps them believe and trust in God’s promises
for the future. It helps them believe that he
will be with them at their side, that the Messiah
will come, and that Israel will flourish.
What we have been celebrating these last three
days is properly understood as an extended
celebration of the Christian Passover. We had
the Supper on Thursday. We had the Sacrifice
of Christ, the Passover Lamb, on Friday, and now, in
the Night of the Resurrection, the Deliverance from
the Slavery of Sin and Death and the journey,
through Baptism and Confirmation, to the Promised
Land of Eternal Life. Three days. Three
events. Together constituting the Christian
Passover. Brought together, day by day,
in Holy Mass – Supper, Sacrifice, and Salvation.
So, in the Mass, as in Jewish Passover, we do
our remembering. We remember that Jesus had
supper with his friends before he died, that he
promised to give his friends his Body and Blood
whenever they meet to remember him. He died on
the Cross as a perfect sacrifice for sin and rose
from the dead to be with us for ever. We remember
all this when we take communion and it brings the
first Easter, from way back in the past, right into
the present, and, if we allow it, it changes our
lives. But there is one important difference
between the Jewish Passover and the Christian
Passover, the Mass. When we receive Holy
Communion, we don’t just remember the past.
The Risen Christ is here in our midst. He
speaks to us in the Gospel, shares the Peace with
us, and feeds us on himself - body, blood and
divinity - when we receive our communion. Nor is
the future dimension missing. The appearance
of Christ in our midst in the Canon of the Mass, and
his abiding Presence with us in the Tabernacle, are
a foretaste of the Parousia, the Second Coming,
when, as we say in the Creed, ‘He will come again in
glory to judge the living and the dead and his
kingdom will have no end’. And so we can say,
confidently, that, though we have not seen the Risen
Christ, we can indeed see him in the Blessed
Sacrament, the Host, and we can love him because of
his Presence with us. We can not only see him
but ‘believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and
exalted joy’. And we can say that, ‘as the outcome
of [our] faith we obtain the salvation of [our]
souls’.
And so, we remember these
special words from Peter’s First Letter, with which
I began:
Without having seen him you love
him; though you do not now see him you believe in
him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. As
the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation
of your souls.
We believe in him and
rejoice in him because he is with us here in the
most holy sacrament of the altar. May the
indescribable and glorious joy described by Peter,
and proclaimed ever since by his successors and the
successors of all the apostles, be yours this Easter
and throughout the rest of your lives, as you love
the One who can’t be seen but in whom we believe.
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Good Friday 2013
THE PASSION AND DEATH of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, as well as arousing within us a sense of
devotion and awe, also brings a certain discomfort,
and even fear. Is that the level of courage
and commitment that we are supposed to be able to
manage too? ‘I just couldn’t do it’, we say to
ourselves. ‘I’ve heard plenty of stories of
those who have faced something similar, and died
bravely, but me? No, I couldn’t manage it’.
And a kind of unease springs up inside us. And
something like that unease bubbles up inside us
whenever those whom we know and love undergo some of
the hardest trials in life – disease, divorce,
disaster, dying.
In this Year of Luke, we briefly
meet two people who share the fate of Jesus.
They were crucified alongside him. We often
pray the final words of the Penitent Thief, St
Dismas, ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into
your kingdom’, but notice less his earlier words,
speaking to the other criminal who had shouted ‘Are
you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!’
Was the ‘other criminal’ taunting Jesus, saying
sarcastically ‘if you’re supposed to be the Messiah,
why don’t you sort this mess out and save our
skins?’ Or was he hoping against hope -
literally desperately - for help? But the
reply of the Penitent Thief was a rebuke:
Do you
not fear God, since you are under the same sentence
of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we
are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this
man has done nothing wrong.
Yes, none of us can
quite escape that sentence of condemnation.
Writing in the seventeenth century, ‘Of the Natural
Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity
and Misery’, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan finds
consolation in strong political government, without
which ‘the life of man’ would be ‘solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short’. Nearly 400
years later, we see what Hobbes means in parts of
the world which blow up like a powder keg – chiefly
in our minds at present is Syria, part of the
ancient Christian heartland. But even where
government is strong and stable, as in our own
country, there are plenty who are lonely and poor,
quite a lot that is nasty and brutish, and even our
enhanced life expectancy does not save us from what,
in the end, whether viewed against a scientific or a
religious backdrop, a short life. If
death were the end, like those thieves, we would be
under the same sentence of condemnation. But
back comes that nagging fear: what happens if none
of it is true and this is all there is? Fine,
for now, if you are lusty and strong. Not so
good when things aren’t so very fine.
We shall
stay a moment or two with St Luke, even though the
account of the Passion we read on Good Friday is
that of St John. There are in St Luke
persistent themes of forgiveness, of goodness, and
of kindness. The Prodigal Son. The Good
Samaritan. Jesus’ kindly words to St Dismas,
the Penitent Thief, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you
will be with me in Paradise’. There is the
Lord’s confidence on the Cross in the Love of God,
‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’, and
there is what is seen as the final triumph of
righteousness, as the centurion, looking on, says,
‘Certainly this man was innocent’.
The centurion reminds us of another centurion,
mentioned by St Matthew and St Luke, whose words we
use every time we come up for Holy Communion, ‘Lord,
I am not worthy that you should enter under my
roof…’ It is St Luke who tells us (7:4-5) that
that centurion too was an example of goodness, ‘He
is worthy to have you do this for him’ – have his
slave healed – ‘for he loves our nation and he built
us our synagogue’. Another instance is Joseph
of Arimathea. Matthew and John describe him as
‘a disciple of Jesus’ – John adds ‘but secretly’ –
and Mark describes him as ‘a respected member of the
council’ and ‘looking for the kingdom of God’.
It is St Luke’s Gospel that tells us that Joseph of
Arimathea was ‘a good a righteous man’.
What
I want to suggest at the Solemn Liturgy this
afternoon is that, though the words of Jesus ring in
our ears – ‘If anyone would come after me, let him
deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’
(Mt 16:24 and parallels), there is plenty to inspire
us in the example of the saints, in the heroism of
those who gave up their lives but also in the sheer
goodness, and the pre-eminence of charity, of the
lives of those who did not have to pay this price.
I am going to finish with a short meditation by one
of my favourite modern saints, Edith Stein, also
known as St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, a
Carmelite martyr, a convert from Judaism, who died
in Auschwitz in 1942, not much over 50 years old.
Though she did embrace the Cross, and shared fully
in the Saviour’s Passion and Death, she offers us
the encouragement of looking at those who shared a
lesser fate but had, or will have, the privilege of
being onlookers. And that includes most of us,
on whom the demands of discipleship are bearable and
more modest than physical martyrdom. Hear then
what St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote about
standing Am Fuss des Kreuzes, At the Foot of the
Cross, on 24th November 1934.
On the way of
the Cross, the Saviour is not alone, and he is not
only surrounded by enemies who harass him. People
who support him are also present: the Mother of God,
model for those who, in every time, follow the
example of the Cross; Simon of Cyrene, a symbol of
those who accept a suffering that is imposed on them
and who are blessed in that acceptance; and
Veronica, an image of those who are pushed by love
to serve the Lord. Each person who, throughout time,
has carried a heavy destiny while remembering the
Saviour’s suffering, or who freely performed an act
of penance, redeemed a little of humankind’s
enormous debt and helped the Lord to carry his
burden. And even more, it is Christ, the head of the
mystical body, who accomplishes his work of
atonement in the members who give themselves with
all their being, body and soul, to his work of
redemption.
We can assume that the vision of
the faithful who would follow him on the path of
suffering upheld the Saviour in the Garden of
Olives. And the support given by those who carried
the Cross was a help to him each time he fell. It
was the righteous of the Old Covenant who
accompanied him between his first fall and the
second one. The disciples, men and women who rallied
around him during his earthly life, were the ones
who helped him from the second to the third station.
The lovers of the Cross, whom he awakened and whom
he will continue to awaken throughout the
vicissitudes of the struggling Church, are his
allies until the end of time. It is to this that we,
too, are called.
Maundy Thursday 2013
After receiving the morsel, Judas immediately went
out, and it was night.
Jn 13:30
IMAGINE the scene. The disciples have
shared a Farewell Supper with the Lord. During
the meal, where there has been a sense of foreboding
in the air, the Lord rose from table, laid aside his
garments, and tied a towel around himself, and began
to wash the disciples’ feet. It was the kind
of thing that a servant did, as guests arrived with
the dust and dirt of a Middle Eastern street on
their sandals. But this was being done by the
Master, in the middle of the meal…. It is
worth us dwelling on this, this year. For one thing,
it is the Year of Luke, and, though St Luke doesn’t
tell us about the Foot-washing, he does record a
discussion between Jesus and the disciples during
the supper.
The kings of the Gentiles
exercise lordship over them; and those in authority
over them are called benefactors. But not so
with you; rather let the greatest among you become
as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.
Lk 22:25-26
‘The
kings of the Gentiles’ truly have not only
surrounded themselves with pomp but made sure that
everyone knows who is in charge, but that is not,
says St Luke, the way the King of the Jews
operates and it is not the way that his followers
must operate.
Our second reason for
drawing attention to this, then, is that we have
what is beginning to look like a new-style papacy.
Pope Francis has already done some stripping away of
the monarchical trappings of the papacy. He
has kept his room in the Domus Sancta Martha – it’s
immediately above the room I stayed in when I was in
Rome in 2010. Throw a stone from the
window and you would hit the side of St Peter’s.
He does his morning meditation in the communal
chapel there – a figure in white on an ordinary
chair on the back row - and takes his meals in the
refectory. Previous popes almost always ate
alone. There was paying of his own bills at
the Casa del Clero, the setting aside of some of the
more elaborate vestments, the simplification of the
inauguration. We have moved on from a
model of the Pope as monarch to a model more
closely in tune with the ‘Servants of the Servants
of Christ’ title. Pope Francis is very aware
of the power of symbol in an age of icon and
sound-bite, 24-hour news and Twitter, and choosing
to go to a Young Offenders’ Detention Centre to
celebrate the Maundy Thursday Mass is a powerful
symbol. Nor is it one cynically dreamt up for
the media: it was the annual practice of the then
Cardinal Bergoglio to visit the under-privileged for
the Maundy Mass in Buenos Aires. One year, a
reformatory for young offenders. Another year,
a shelter for single mothers.
Liturgists
would argue that a bishop should be in his cathedral
for the Maundy Thursday Mass. After all, the
Supper of Thursday, the Sacrifice of Friday, and the
dawning Presence of Saturday all belong to the one
Paschal Mystery, the Christian Passover, which we
celebrate entire in every Mass, but separate out,
attentively, over the Triduum. But, even if
one would have preferred the Bishop of Rome to be in
his cathedral, one cannot help taking notice of
what he is doing instead. Privileging the
under-privileged. Valuing those whom society has
sent away to be punished. Giving the ceremony
of the foot-washing the status of a sacrament in
itself, and privileging it (as the account in St
John’s Gospel does) over the institution of the Holy
Eucharist. More than that, since it was Simon
Peter who argued with Jesus about whether the
foot-washing was appropriate, it is particularly
poignant when the successor of Peter highlights the
importance of that ceremony.
The
foot-washing is not just about service, not just
about friends caring for one another. It is
also what one does for the one’s enemies, for those
who will turn against us. Jesus washes the
feet of Judas during the very meal in which he
confides with the disciples that one of them will
betray him. The foot-washing must include the
notion of baptism too. The symbolic cleansing
of one part of the body – washing just the feet
rather than the hands and the head too, as Peter,
protesting, suggests Jesus should do - is
just like the sacrament of Baptism. In fact,
we can say that the mini-sacrament of foot-washing
is a type, a form, of the great sacrament of
Baptism. ‘If I do not wash you’, says Jesus,
‘you have no part in me’ (Jn 13:8). It is by
the ritual washing of Baptism, then, that we become
part of Christ, in Christo, members of his Body.
If it is shocking that Jesus effectively
baptises Judas, moments before he slips out into the
night to betray him, it is even more shocking that
he dips a morsel in the cup and gives it to Judas,
which is the very point, we are told, at which Satan
enters Judas. Here we have an obvious
reference to the Holy Eucharist, even though the
Institution of the Eucharist is missing from John’s
account of the Last Supper. This link
between Eucharist and betrayal is unmistakeable: it
is there in St John’s teaching on the Eucharist,
John 6, where Jesus concludes by saying ‘Did I not
choose you, the Twelve, and one of you is a devil?
He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for
he, one of the Twelve, was to betray him.’
As many of us experienced last night at Tenebrae,
there is indeed being waged what can only be
described as a battle between Light and Darkness.
Certainly, that is how Jesus describes it in St
John’s Gospel. We know that the Light is
triumphant and that sentence has already been passed
on Darkness. And yet the fight has still to be
fought and won, in our own lives, in our
relationships, in our communities, and in our world.
Yesterday, Spy Wednesday, we saw Judas conspiring
with Jesus’ enemies. Tonight, we see them at
the Last Supper. We learn not only about
Jesus’ abiding presence in our midst, in the Most
Holy Eucharist, but also that even those washed
clean in Baptism and handed the sacred morsel of
Holy Communion, can turn into betrayers. We
work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for,
in the meantime, there is darkness, not only in the
lives of young offenders but also, and not least, in
ourselves.
After receiving the morsel,
Judas immediately went out, and it was night.
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