Week 14 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 8:4-7, 11-13; Matthew 9:32-38

In his commentary on this passage of Matthew's gospel, St Thomas Aquinas says that in how he acts here Jesus 'gives an example for preachers'. It is not the only place where he uses this phrase, understanding the public ministry of Jesus as the apostolic school, the place in which Jesus is teaching the apostles what is expected of them.

Thomas picks out three points in this education of preachers. Jesus goes around the towns and villages. Preachers must be ready to move, Thomas says, not staying always in one place. We can think of place geographically, of course, but in other ways also. The preacher must be willing to work in different situations and contexts, with different kinds of people responding to different needs and challenges. There must be an availability in the preacher, a willingness to move to where needs are greatest.

Secondly, Jesus preaches and teaches and cures as he goes from place to place. The preacher must be ready not just to talk but also to act. Jesus is a healer as well as a teacher. The one who preaches but does not practise will realise (please God) that his words are empty, blowing in the wind. Compassion is the root of preaching as we are also taught in this passage and compassion moves people not just to preach and to teach but also to alleviate suffering in other ways, to correct injustice, to undertake any of the works of mercy.

Thirdly, Thomas makes the point that some preachers have the task of preparing the harvest and others (it seems to be implied by him) the task of reaping it. Perhaps he is influenced by how St Paul was to speak later about Christian preachers, that some sow, some water, and some reap the harvest. How has the harvest become 'full'? Thomas understands it in the sense of mature or ripe and feels that some work of preaching and teaching must already have taken place to bring it to this point.

All of this in the context of the cure of a dumb man. It is a reminder to the preacher that it is God who gives not just words, the capacity for speech, but effective words, words that achieve their purpose. It is God who takes away our dumbness, the limitations of our preaching that come from sinfulness and tiredness and whatever other source. Wherever the words we speak become for another person words that carry the Word, it is the work of the Spirit moving their minds to see what is true and their hearts to embrace what is good. But the preacher has an essential, and privileged, role in assisting this process of encounter with God's compassionate Word.

Pope Francis, in his exhortation on The Joy of the Gospel, reminds us that all baptised Christians are, by virtue of their baptism, missionary disciples.  All must be ready to bear witness to Christ, in ways appropriate to each one's vocation, through availability, through speaking, through action.

Week 14 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 2:16, 17-18, 21-22; Ps 144/145; Matthew 9:18-26

'Jesus rose and followed him'. We are more used to this phrase being used about people who follow Jesus: they take up their beds and follow him, they leave their nets and follow him, they leave their tax office and follow him. But here we are told that Jesus gets up and follows the man whose daughter has died. Jesus too is obedient, he hears a call and he responds to it.

The first reading, a well known and very beautiful passage from Hosea, teaches us about the kind of relationship God wants to have with His people. It is not to be that of master and slave in which one kind of obedience will be found but that of bridegroom and bride in which another kind of obedience will be found. The obedience in marriage is mutual, between equals, arising from the committed love of bride and groom. Love is the source of this obedience and so it is an obedience that is completely free. This is how God wants His people to be relating to Him. But it also binds God to a comparable obedience for the covenant is always two sided.

The love of Christ compels us, St Paul says in 2 Corinthians. There is a love compelling God also. Or better the love that God is compels Him. We learn from Jesus, God-with-us, that He too is listening out for human need, for the places and people who need compassion and help. His obedience is to turn towards those people and those places, to respond to the call of their poverty and distress, to get up and seek them out.

It is the ideal of obedience for which we strive, an obedience that arises simply and solely from love and that gets all its meaning from the love from which it flows. Of course there are other loves, other desires, jostling together in us but we can pray that this love, for Christ and his way, will become more and more the fundamental and dominant love of our lives, the one that obliges us to the obedience of love, the utterly free obedience which, Jesus shows us, God is.

Saint Thomas the Apostle - 3 July

Readings: Ephesians 2:19-22; Psalm 116; John 20:24-29

The apostle Thomas is to be thanked not so much for asking the reasonable question - 'you expect me to believe that without some evidence? ' - as for being the first Christian to direct our attention to the wounds of Jesus. It is sometimes said that John's gospel is the most spiritual of the gospels but it can just as easily be described as the most physical. It begins by telling us that the Word became flesh and it ends telling us about the fleshliness of the Risen Lord, how physical a reality He is. The moment in which his flesh is opened and penetrated by the soldier's lance is of great significance: blood and water flowed out, as the one who witnessed it can testify. Thomas is invited to retrace the route of the lance.

The body of the Risen Lord is marked by the wounds of his passion. The damage done to him in the course of his life and death, the scars of his work, the abuse to which he was subjected - all of this can heal in some ways, it is even taken up into the glorification of his body, but it will always be there, it will always be a fact about the life lived in this body, the suffering endured by it. The story of that body's experience in this world is forever inscribed in its flesh. Thomas helps us to see that there is damage done to bodies that can never be undone, that there are wounds, weaknesses and imperfections that are still to be seen even in the glory of the Resurrection. Thomas sets it up for Jesus to teach us that by His wounds we are healed, because in His wounds He is glorious.

Vulnera means wounds, vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. Bodies that are only fantasies cannot be wounded or affected in any way, they cannot be touched, and are not susceptible to suffering. But Jesus shared in the suffering and endurance that comes in every human life. This is what bodies are capable of, suffering, endurance, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. This is what the glorified body of Jesus is gloriously capable of, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. In other words, in his risen body, and more than ever, he is capable of loving.

We become expert at knowing the vulnerabilities of others and the more intimately we share life the more expert we are at this. We can exploit and abuse others, taking advantage of their vulnerability. But it is in wounds and in weakness, in limitation and in imperfection, that the work of grace is seen most clearly. The disciples realised this early, Paul most remarkably, that when we are weak we are strong, that God's grace is sufficient for our weakness, that God's weakness is more powerful than human strength and his foolishness wiser than human wisdom. The saints who are most useful to us are not the ones who are photoshop-perfect, whom we project into a place of super-human perfection. The saints who are most useful to us are the ones in whom we see God's grace shining gloriously through human weakness, in the first place the apostles themselves in their fragility and vulnerability, Peter who vacillates and Doubting Thomas.

We must look then to the wounds of Our Lord and also to our own wounds. These are places of suffering, but that means they are places that solicit love, for to love is to be vulnerable, touchable, open to sharing the sufferings of another. The body of the Risen Lord is the most beautiful, glorious, compelling, and seductive, body in creation. And it is so because in the Resurrection it remains a body capable of breathing and living, capable of touching and loving. We do not worship idols that are dead no matter how beautiful they seem. We worship the living and true God who shares our weakness so that we (even in our flesh) might share His glory.

Week 13 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Amos 5:14-15, 21-24; Psalm 49; Matthew 8:28-34

Deus humanissimus - God most human - is a phrase associated with the theological work of the Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx. It comes to mind in thinking about today's readings which present us with various kinds of monstrous creatures, surreal activities and confusing human behaviour. In the midst of so much distortion and confusion stands one who is simply and wholly human, one with a heart of flesh, Jesus, radiating truth and compassion.

Away with solemnities and feasts, says Amos, with holocausts and oblations, with fattened cattle and noisy liturgies. Today's passage is a short summary of things Amos says frequently and more stridently throughout his book. Why not be simply human, he asks, showing your religious devotion and your faith in God by living justly and practising goodness? It is how you treat other people that is most important. Let justice and goodness guide your actions and characterise your personality: they are simple things but preferred by God in place of elaborate ceremonies accompanied by the distortions of corruption and injustice.

The gospel reading then takes us into a world that is like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, weird and wonderful, surreal and unsettling, dark and twisted. The demoniacs are human beings but possessed by evil spirits and so they are not in their right minds, they are not simply human. The demons themselves are not human either of course and their agenda is to distort and fragment, to disturb the balance of creation, and to distract people from justice and goodness. The ways and means of doing this are not important, they will try anything, and many things work. Neither are the unfortunate swine human, innocent victims in this tale, carrying the curse of being classified as unclean in earlier parts of sacred scripture.

The swineherds, like the disciples in yesterday's reading, are out of their minds with fear, running away to tell everything that had happened, including what happened to the demoniacs. It is a strange gloss: one would have thought that the main thing they had to tell was what had happened to the demoniacs. Instead we are told that they told the whole story, they reported everything ... including what happened to the demoniacs.

The whole story - how far back did they go in telling the story? The story they have to tell is about Jesus. Paradoxically, the figure in the story who is simplest and most straightforward is the one who is most terrifying. Having received a full report, the whole town set out to meet him and as soon as they saw him they implored him to leave the neighbourhood! One would have thought that a neighbourhood familiar with demons, demoniacs and swine would have been able to bear the presence among them of one who is simply and wholly human. But it is not so. He is, it seems, the most fear provoking character in the story and they ask him to leave them alone. Whatever it is about him.

Among the strange and startling creatures that appear in these pages of the gospel, screaming demons and demented pigs, the would-be followers, the doubting disciples, the terrified townspeople - there is one who is fulfilling the plan of creation with integrity and clarity. His, in the words of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, is 'the right human face' and humankind cannot bear very much of that simple reality, of the judgment implied in it, of the holiness it reveals. Edwin Muir's poem is cool spring water compared with the distortions recounted in the scripture readings:

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face. / I in my mind had waited for this long,

Seeing the false and searching for the true, / Then found you as a traveller finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong / Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you, 

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste, / A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good, an eye / That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed, / The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea, / Not beautiful or rare in every part,

But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

- Edwin Muir, 'The Confirmation', published in The Narrow Place, 1943

Week 13 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Amos 3:1-8; Psalm 5; Matthew 8:23-27

The series of questions in the first reading seem to be all of the kind 'is the Pope a Catholic?' The answer seems to be obvious, easy and simple in each case: the connection between the two parts of each question is perfectly clear and well known. The lion's roar, the falling bird, the effect of a trumpet sounding - there are immediate and predictable connections of 'cause and effect' in each case. So Amos implies.

Some aspects of the relationship between God and the people are as obvious as these connections in nature and in human affairs. If God is angry, it will be particularly with the ones He has chosen that He will be angry. (The more you are given, the more will be expected of you.) If God is acting, then He will not do so without revealing his plans to the prophets. And if the Lord speaks to His prophet, the prophet in turn must speak (remember that Amos, who knows what it involves, is reluctant to take on the task of prophesying.)

There is causality - 'therefore' - between the Lord's choice and what is expected of the people. There is causality - 'therefore' - between the prophet's vocation and what he must do. There is causality - 'therefore' - between the people's behaviour and the way God must react in response: 'prepare to meet your God'. Is it a threat or a promise?

This last kind of causality is deeply problematic. Is it true that we know how God must act in response to human behaviour? Is God obliged to anything? Has God bound Himself to particular ways of acting which cannot be suspended even if God, in the words of the prophet Jonah, repents of what He intended to do?

The gospel reading gives us two more examples of causality, one is obvious, easy and simple, and the other is mysterious, takes us beyond the merely problematic, and raises the deepest possible questions.

The easy one is the connection between a sudden storm at sea and the fear it provokes in those on a small boat caught in the storm. Even experienced fishermen - they more than anyone else - fear the sea, for they know what it can be like and what it can do. Does a storm break out at sea and the fisherman not fear? Does a man rebuke wind and sea and the storm stops?

The mysterious 'therefore' in the gospel is the one that connects Jesus rebuking the winds and the sea and the storm ceasing. This provokes astonishment: 'what kind is he?', they ask (what sort of human being, what kind of agent, with what force or power working in him or through him?) that even the wind and the seas obey him? For one who knows the Bible the obvious answer seems shocking, even blasphemous: it is the Lord who commands the waters, divides them, and sets limits to their flowing.

It sends us back to the last kind of causality that the first reading seemed to express. God can only act as God and that is always with full freedom, out of love, in order to create. A God of retribution, anger and appropriate punishment fits more neatly into the framework of cause and effect that we can manage. He would be an agent within our world, subject to its laws, just bigger and more powerful than any other agent in that world. But if this is all we say about God then we are speaking of an idol. Instead we are invited, by Jesus and by the Father he reveals to us, to open our minds and hearts to the vast spaces of divine freedom, to the infinite creativity of divine power, to the unpredictable and revolutionary tenderness of One who is, always and everywhere, Everlasting Love. We must learn about God's retribution, anger and punishment by studying Jesus, his words, his teaching, his experience.

Prepare to meet your God. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Threat or promise?

SS Peter and Paul -- 29 June

Readings: Acts 12:1-11; Psalm 33(34); 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-19

'He who sits in the heavens laughs.' We can speculate as to what might bring a smile to God's lips. Religion is often presented as a very, very serious business and yet today's feast brings to mind many amusing things. Peter for example is called 'rock' and he is as changeable as the weather. He is a stone invited to float on water. Paul seems to have been something of a control freak, taking charge and breathing fury, and yet he is led by the hand into Damascus and later escapes from the city by being let down over the wall in a basket.

There are echoes of Jonah in the way Peter and Paul are pulled and shoved this way and that. Their releases from prison, Peter in Acts 12 and Paul in Acts 16, are pieces of comedy also. Paul has been rescued out of the mouth, not of a sea monster, but of the more familiar lion. Peter begins to sink as soon as he remembers what he is doing and is, not for the last time, rescued from the deep by his Lord. They are thumped by angels and beaten by men, we can say, pushed around and reminded again and again that they are instruments of the gospel, instruments in the hands of the Lord they have come to love.

This may seem cruel until we see its results. For example, their experiences make it clear that human beings are not gods. In Acts 14 Paul is mistaken for a god and, when he disappoints, is subsequently stoned. God uses human personalities, even and especially their limitations and weaknesses, to make them instruments of his grace and glory. He takes them up into his work but when we see their weaknesses and smile at their foibles there is no danger that we will mistake them for the God they serve.

Another good result from seeing the humanity of Peter and Paul is that we can think again about what is really serious. God's love is really serious. The gates of hell will not prevail against the kingdom of that love. Nothing else compares with it as both Peter and Paul testify, Peter with his question 'Lord, to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life', Paul with those magnificent texts scattered through his letters that neither success nor failure, illness nor health, poverty nor riches, strength nor weakness, things present, past or to come, nothing in all creation compares to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, sharing in his sufferings so as to share in the glory of his resurrection.

In 751 BC two brothers founded a city, Romulus and Remus, the wonderful city of Rome, established on pride, ambition and eventually murder. In the first century, and without setting out to do it, two brothers in the Lord, Peter and Paul, founded a city on the same spot, as instruments of God, witnesses to God's love by their preaching and teaching, in how they lived and in how they died, a city founded on faith, and hope, and love.

Week 13 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: 2 Kings 4.8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89; Romans 6.3-4, 8-11; Matthew 10.37-42

What kind of analogy is it, the one that is spoken of with the little words 'as' and 'so'? What kind of comparison? It is found often in the Gospel of John, for example 'as the Father sent me, so I send you' (John 20.21) and 'as I live because of the Father, so you will live because of me' (John 6.57). In today's readings we find it in St Paul's Letter to the Romans: 'as' Christ was raised from death, 'so' we, in being baptised, die with him in order that we too might live a new life'. 

As the resurrection of Jesus is not just a restoration but a new creation, so all who are in Christ are a new creation also (2 Corinthians 5.17). Whenever creation is involved the power of God needs to be engaged and we see that power working through the prophet Elisha in the first reading. He promises a son to a woman who has no children, a veritable new creation also, to make her be a mother.

As it was with Christ, so it will be with us. And this continues in the gospel reading where he asks us to let go of every attachment in order to follow him. Even our attachment to ourselves. That seems very demanding, practically impossible for the kind of creature that we are. But by God's grace - and nothing is impossible for God - it becomes as simply as giving a cup of cold water to one of the 'little ones'.

Reading on in the Gospel of Matthew we soon come to the passage where Jesus calls us to learn from him and to take his yoke upon us, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. As the yoke was shouldered by Jesus and as the burden was carried by him, so we are empowered by God's grace to follow him. It is love that makes the yoke easy and the burden light. As he loved us so we are to love him and one another (John 13.34).

We should perhaps call it the 'Christological analogy': as things are for Christ in relation to the Father, so they are for us in relation to Him and to the Father. It means taking seriously, literally, what St Paul means when he speaks of us 'being in Christ', or when he says 'it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me' (Galatians 2.20).

Let us give thanks for this gift of grace which enables us to live for God as Jesus lived - and lives - for God.