Week 26 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Baruch 1.15-22; Psalm 79; Luke 10.13-16

This summer, 2025, I prepared retreat talks on the verse from Psalm 94(95) which is the Alleluia verse before the gospel today: 'O that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your hearts'. Because today is the penultimate day in the entire series of retreats given this summer the appearance of this verse, on which I have been offering meditations for some months, seems like a 'nod from on high', a kind of blessing or endorsement of what I and the various communities I've worked with have been doing.

To hear the voice of the Lord requires a heart that is open and 'soft', ready to receive and to learn. God's speaking can be picked up along various channels if we have a heart ready to hear. Through creation and the prophets, in the events of Israel's history and its wisdom literature, in the teaching and actions and paschal mystery of Christ above all. And Christ points us in further directions, to the neighbour who speaks to me of God in one way or another, even to my enemies, to the Church in its preaching and its sacramental life.

I am tempted to say that God is shouting at us, or at least in spite of what often seems like his absence and his silence, there are many ways in which to listen out for God's voice if we 'tune in' in the right way.

The heart sometimes becomes hard for very understandable reasons - fear, hurt, betrayal - but sometimes for reasons that are not so good - boredom or self-centredness, even indifference and cruelty. We know we are to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate but we know also that we need God's love poured into our hearts if those that remain stony are to be replaced with human hearts. We need God to prepare the good soil to receive the seed of God's Word and bear fruit.

Truly to hear the voice of the Lord means living out in our lives what we hear, building our house on rock in that way, not listening and then forgetting but actively putting it into practice. In times of repentance and renewal, as in the first reading from Baruch, we will lament the fact that we have not listened well to God's voice. And the gospel reading reminds us that we are to be not only listeners and spectators but speakers and witnesses, God speaking also through us as we seek to stay with Jesus on his way to Jerusalem.

The Guardian Angels - 2 October

Readings: Exodus 23:20-23; Psalm 91; Matthew 18:1-5,10

It is clear from the readings and prayers these days, for the feast of the archangels and for today's feast, that the Christian tradition is more confident about what angels do than about what kind of being they are, clearer about the services they provide than about their nature. They are creatures who teach, guide and protect other creatures.

In doing these things they are agents of the providence of God, bringing that providence to bear in every nook and corner of the creation. We might, reasonably, think that God will be more concerned about what is happening to people in Ukraine and the Middle East than about someone's ingrown toenail. It seems obscene even to be making such a comparison.

Yet Jesus teaches us that every hair on our head is counted. Are we to take it seriously? There is a temptation to push God's providence back, away from very particular and concrete things, to a more general, universal level. But nothing that happens to his children falls outside God's care. Anything that forms part of the progress or distress of the world falls within the scope of God's interest. We are tempted to despise the 'little ones', the things that seem trivial and unimportant in the grander scheme of things. But these feasts of the angels remind us that God's providence reaches everywhere. Nothing that affects his children or is of interest to them is too small to be regarded as beneath God's dignity. The feast of the guardian angels reminds us of this fact.

In the tradition also the term 'angel' is sometimes used to refer to a human being who carries out one of the angelic services of teaching, guiding or protecting on behalf of another human being. I presume we have all been told, from time to time, 'you're an angel, thank you for that'. Here is something even more wonderful about God's providence: as well as making creatures to be provided for, God has made some creatures capable of providing for others, teaching, guiding and protecting them, and so sharing in His care for creation. Think of parents in the first place, archangels.

So wherever we experience these kindnesses - being taught, being guided, being protected - we are being cared for by angels and, in them, by God who is steadfast love and faithfulness.

Week 26 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Nehemiah 2.1-8; Psalm 137; Luke 9.57-62

Once again the city of Jerusalem is the focus of concern in today's liturgy. Nehemiah is among the exiles in Babylon, and finds a sympathetic listener in King Artaxerxes whom he is serving and who notices his sadness. Artaxerxes is the third Persian king we hear about in recent days, after his predecessors Cyrus and Darius. All three are credited in the Bible with having facilitated the return of the exiled Hebrews to the land of Judah.

The sadness of Nehemiah is reflected in the most plaintive of the psalms, 'by the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion'. It was not just the ordinary homesickness and nostalgia of the person forced into exile but something much more powerful. Because it meant losing all the ways in which God had assured His people of His presence with them - the land, the city, the temple - it was a sadness of heart, as the king noticed. But, we might even say, it was a sadness of soul - metaphysical, theological, spiritual - at the thought that it was the people's own infidelity that had led to their loss and exile. So a sadness mixed with guilt, a profound grief. How could the people pretend to be joyful living in such a state of soul?

They were coming to see, however, that the Lord, their God, was not confined to them or to their city. Had he not used foreign powers as his instruments in bringing about the exile? And was he not using these foreign kings as his ministers in facilitating the restoration? It might seem that we should even apply to God Himself the sentiments of the exiles - may my right hand wither if I forget you, Jerusalem, and may my tongue cleave to my mouth if I remember you not. For had He not, not long before this and through the prophet Jeremiah, declared that His love for them was everlasting (Jeremiah 31.1).

Jesus is also on the way to Jerusalem and there is an intensity in his state of soul as he journeys there. His destination however is not just the earthly city of Jerusalem but what he calls 'the Kingdom of God'. That is where he is going and he sees that it will be difficult to find companions who will stay with him once they realise what inaugurating the Kingdom will entail. He himself clearly does realise this - it will involve a freedom, a detachment, a sacrifice of oneself and of everything; it will demand a more than ordinary human strength and courage.

Nehemiah is on his way to rebuild the Temple. Jesus is on his way to inaugurate the Kingdom. Now the everlasting love of God, become flesh in Jesus Christ, will engage with the greatest enemies of humanity, sin, the powers of evil, death itself, in order to overcome these enemies and establish an eternal kingdom of justice, love and peace. It is already now established, and it is coming, even as we grieve all that continues to work against it - wars and oppression, violence and exploitation, injustice and cruelty. May our right hands wither and our tongues cleave to our mouths if we fail to remember what the Lord has done, and is doing, for us.

Week 26 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Zechariah 8:20-23; Psalm 87; Luke 9:51-56

The city of Jerusalem is the geographical centre of salvation history. A place of infinite sorrow and immeasurable joy, its history is characterised by a fierce and uncompromising character, not only in the centuries before Jesus, but also in those that followed, right up to the present day.

In today's Gospel, we are told twice that Jesus 'set his face' towards Jerusalem. The holy city is the site of Mount Zion, the site of the Temple Mount, and had become the symbol of the people and their relationship with God. The city is Israel, and God's relationship with Zion, the place of his dwelling, is God's relationship with Israel, the people he has made his own.

Jerusalem encompasses all the joy and all the pain that have accompanied that covenant relationship over the centuries. It was the place where God had revealed himself most fully through the words of his prophets. It was the place of liturgy and sacrifice, offered in the presence of God. It was the place of royal power from which God's wisdom and guidance were to spread to all nations.

It is not right for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem, says Jesus, and so when God finally sent His Son, the Son turned his face towards Jerusalem. The first devastation of the city, with the loss of the Temple and the experience of exile, had ultimately led to a new freedom in the people's understanding of God and a new intimacy in their relationship with God. The great prophets of the exile helped them to reach this understanding and this new intimacy. God became at once more universal (Creator and Lord of all the earth) and more local (all nations will come to Mount Zion), more transcendent (my ways and my thoughts are very high) and more intimate (I will establish a new covenant written in the hearts of men).

The final destruction of Jerusalem is the killing of Jesus. He is Israel, the people called to be faithful. He is the Temple, the dwelling place of God among men. He is destroyed in Jerusalem. His decision to turn his face towards Jerusalem was not a political strategy, but a theological necessity: he had come to do the Father's will, and that meant walking towards Jerusalem.

Jesus already lives in complete freedom and total intimacy with the Father, things he wishes to share with his disciples. On his journey towards the earthly Jerusalem, he already lives in the city that is to come. With his death and resurrection in Jerusalem, he established a new and eternal freedom, a new and eternal intimacy, in the relationship between his people and God: this is the grace of the New Testament, a new dwelling place for God among us, the grace brought in the earthen vessel that is the Church.

With every loss of the Holy Place in the course of the people's history there is a fresh appreciation of God's otherness and God's closeness. With every entry into the darkness of God's absence there is a deeper understanding of how God has identified with his people. God dwells now in his people, wherever they live in the world, for they dwell in Him who is always near, always close, with his face always turned towards His people.

Feast of the Archangels -- 29 September

Readings: Daniel 7:9-10 /Revelation 12:7-12; Psalm 138; John 1:47-51

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It is a question often asked and people like to entertain the idea that there might be. Most science fiction depends on a positive answer to the question.

The Bible and the Christian tradition (as well as many other religious traditions) also give a positive answer to the question: yes, there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We may take 'elsewhere' to mean geography: there might be other planets, other galaxies, in which other creatures with intelligence will be found. The Bible gives us no clear answer about this. But if 'elsewhere' means metaphysics, then the Bible's answer is very clear: there are other intelligent creatures, on other levels of being, apart from those we know about through sensation.

There is much nostalgia for an enchanted world, testified to by the great quantity of books and films about other beings and other possibilities of being. It is a nostalgia for the angels, we can say, an implicit recognition that the beauty and power of God are infinite and so there is no end to the number and kind of creatures that might reflect that beauty and power. Recent centures in the West have seen the spiritual landscape denuded and depopulated, often reduced to the human being either alone with his 'spirituality' or seeking to relate, however uncertainly, with God. The feast of the archangels recalls us to something much richer, more interesting, and more profound.

The angels help us to know where we are in the universe, they help us to find and to know our place. Raphael does this most explicitly, guiding the young Tobias along his way, so that he finds love and joy through his trust and faith in God. Gabriel too gives guidance, explaining to Zechariah and to Mary the missions God has for each of them. Michael is the protector of God's people, the guardian of the boundaries of their worlds, leader of the heavenly armies. It is why so many strategic points are dedicated to Michael, Skellig Michael in Kerry, for example, or Mont Saint Michel, to name just two.

It can be argued that one of the great weaknesses of modern thought is its narrow understanding of the human being, a kind of 'angelism' for which the human being is 'a soul in a body'. The human being came to be defined in terms of his rationality over against nature, even the nature that is closest to him, his own body. Here is another way in which the angels help us to know who we are. We are not pure intelligences and we are not the brightest of God's creatures. We are rational animals created in the image of God. But the image of God in us, Aquinas says, is fuller than it is in the angels precisely because we are rational animals and not trapped angels. As animals we reproduce, reflecting God's generativity in which the Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit from the Father and the Son. As animals we are composite creatures with a soul that animates every part of the body and not just some special places. This fact about us reflects the presence of God in His creation everywhere and not just in some special places.

All we know about the angels is in reference to the mystery of Christ and human salvation. It is likely that there is lots more about angels, and perhaps about other creatures also, of which we are completely ignorant. We know about them to the extent that they are involved with us and with our salvation. So they are messengers, as Gregory the Great says, even preachers, as Augustine says, carrying to us something of the light and intelligence of God. However it is Christ who is the head of the angels as he is the head of human beings, made lower than the angels in becoming human but raised higher in being given the name that is above every other name. We call Mary, his mother, Queen of the Angels. These mighty beings serve human needs.

All is towards Christ, the Lamb who stands at the centre of the great visions of the Apocalypse. He is the Son of Man on whom the angels ascend and descend. The elders, the living creatures, the angels gathered for the festival, everything on earth, under the earth, and above the earth: all is through him and for him. When Israel's prayer is answered (Isaiah 63-64), and the Lord does rend the heavens to come down, His presence is revealed not just in chains of angels uniting heaven and earth but in the coming of the Eternal Son who is also the firstborn of all creation and the firstborn from the dead.

Week 26 Sunday (Year C)

Readings: Amos 6:1,4-7; Psalm 145; 1 Timothy 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

For the final ten years or so of his pontificate, John Paul II made constant use of a set of three ideas whenever he spoke about Christian life, the Church, or particular vocations within the Church. These three ideas are those of contemplation, communion and mission. He spoke of them so often and in such a way that they seemed to represent for him what we might call the Christian ‘gene’. In calling them the Christian gene what I mean is that this threefold reality will be found wherever there is Christian life. The structure of that form of life, its DNA if you like, is always contemplation, communion and mission. No matter what a person’s vocation or state in life, whether married or single, lay person, deacon, religious, priest or bishop, all through every instance of Christian life will be found some form of contemplation (prayer, thoughtfulness), some form of communion (friendship, love, being with others), and some form of mission (reaching out, witness, teaching).

The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus shows us what life is like without contemplation, without communion and without mission. It shows us the ‘anti-Christian life’, life outside the kingdom Christ came to establish. Instead of contemplation there is blindness. Instead of communion there is an unbridgeable gulf. Instead of mission there is paralysis and the death, it seems, of any hope.

The rich man did not see Lazarus until the urgency of his own situation in Hades led him to look up. Then he saw him. But when the poor man was lying at his gate, he did not see him. He presumably knew he was there, saw him physically as he passed in and out, but in any significant sense he did not ‘see’ him. He was blind to the man’s need, oblivious to the injustice of their situation. This is what riches do – Luke’s gospel has been telling us this again and again this year – riches, of whatever kind, tend to blind the one who is rich. It is not just our attitude to riches, Luke’s gospel teaches, but the simple fact of being rich that tends to coarsen people and make them insensitive.

If contemplation is the first element, communion is the second in the Christian gene, the DNA of Christian life. Again the parable shows us its opposite. There is no communication between the rich man and the poor man. There is no shared life, no communion. The most the poor man can hope for is the scraps from the rich man’s table, those pieces of bread used by the rich man and his guests to wipe their plates before throwing them on the ground for the dogs. The most the rich man can hope for is that Abraham might send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water to cool his burning tongue. But even then the rich man does not speak directly to Lazarus. He speaks instead to Abraham.

How sad it all is. It is the sadness of being strangers to one another, of not talking to one another, of misunderstanding and betrayal. It is the difficulty of coming to trust where there seems to be no basis for trust. These difficulties are found everywhere, in families and workplaces, in religious communities and in the Church itself, but that does not take away from their sadness. Instead of common ground there are unbridgeable chasms and gulfs that cannot be crossed, situations for which, it seems, there is no solution.

But God, as revealed in Jesus, is communion. The eternal happiness of God is the knowing and loving of one another of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have been called to share that life, the communion of mutual knowing and loving that God is. But we do not share it if we are not prepared to be in communion with one another: if we say we love God while hating our brother we are liars, Saint John tells us (1 John 4:20). We believe, though, that the unbridgeable gulfs and chasms that keep people apart and that even lead them to think of each other as enemies have been bridged by Christ. This is why we call him our Saviour and Redeemer. Saint Catherine of Siena was very fond of the image of Christ as a bridge, a pontifex, establishing communion between heaven and earth, a bridge that reaches from side to side to unite what seemed irreconcilable. The bridge, of course, is the cross of Christ, stretched across those gulfs and chasms, by which he has reconciled all things to God and enemies to one another, drawing all into one communion of love (Ephesians 2:11-22).

The third element of the Christian gene is mission. The Church as a whole, and all its individual members, live a life (or are called to be living a life) marked not only by contemplation (good seeing, prayer, thoughtfulness) and communion (shared life, friendship, love) but also by mission. Once again the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is helpful because it presents us with two people who are disempowered for different reasons. Remember, what we see in the parable is the ‘anti-Christian life’ and so there is no sense of mission here. The poor man is passive throughout, seems listless, not just when he is on earth allowing the dogs to lick his sores but in the afterlife also, as he reclines on the bosom of Abraham. The rich man is also impotent, paralysed. In this life he was blinded by his wealth, in the next he shows some concern, if only for his own brothers, but there is nothing, it seems, that he can do.

The person who believes in Christ, on the other hand, and who is therefore living this life of contemplation and communion, will not be powerless. There is always something that can be done. The life Christ gives us is about action, bearing fruit, following him, going and doing likewise, taking up our own cross, keeping his commandment of love. It is not just that we decide we should do something because we have received so much. It is just that the form of life we are talking about is of itself fruit-bearing and action-producing. If it does not do that then the gene is somehow defective, the DNA is missing some of its parts. If there is contemplation and communion then there will be mission also.

Sometimes people think Christianity is a recipe for passivity in this world. Although the lives and sometimes the teaching of Christians have on occasion contributed to this view, it remains a profound misunderstanding. There is always something to be done. If the life we are living is one of contemplation and communion leading to mission there will be some fruitfulness in our lives. We can seek the truth, for example. We can pray. We can think about things: how the world would change if more time and space were given to good thinking. Was it not Pascal, the French philosopher, who remarked that half the world’s problems would be solved if only people could sit quietly in a room for an hour (or words to that effect). We can study. We can hold others in mind. We can try to know ourselves better. We can try to know and love others better.

Sometimes when we think of ‘doing something’ we think immediately of the public, social world, even the political world. God knows there is great need for a Christian presence in the public world, not just the presence of Christians but the presence of those things that characterise Christian living, once again contemplation and communion.

If Lazarus is listless and the rich man is trapped we are always full of confidence. It is a confidence based not on our own abilities. It is based on the life Christ has shared with us and it flows naturally from that life when it is healthy, a life of contemplation and communion bearing fruit in our service of Christ and of his Church.

Week 25 Saturday (Year 1)

Readings: Zechariah 2.5-9, 14-15a; Jeremiah 31.10-14 ; Luke 9.43b-45

The prophets of the Restoration, after the people return from exile in Babylon, become more and more apocalyptic. What does that mean? It means their understanding of things looks now towards a future fulfilment that would be cosmic, comprehensive and definitive, at a time yet to be revealed. In the exile they had lost everything they had counted on and their return could never be simply back to the way things were before. Too much had changed in their deepest understanding of God and of their place in God's plan.

Through their experience of loss God clearly revealed himself to them as the one and only God of all creation and the one and only Lord of all history. Israel's place in God's plan is in one way relativised, but in another way revealed in its fulness, for the other nations are God's creation also and their destiny is God's concern. The first reading at Mass today is just one of the passages in the Bible which speak of many nations joining themselves to the Lord 'on that day' when 'they shall be his people and he will dwell among them'. In other words the original promise to Abraham is to be fulfilled as the nations also are gathered into the fold of God's people and so brought into the blessings of the covenant - 'I will be your and their God, and you and they will be my people'.

In the gospel reading Jesus, who for Christians inaugurates 'the day of the Lord' foretold by the prophets, warns his disciples of the crisis that will accompany that inauguration, affecting him personally and radically. There is no birth without blood, and that is what is implied in him saying to the disciples that the Son of Man - he himself, and for Israel the one who will inaugurate the cosmic fulfilment - is to be 'handed over to men'. It is to happen in the 'today' of Jesus's earthly life but in a manner no one imagined before it happened.

He had inaugurated his public ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4) telling the people that he had come to proclaim 'the year of the Lord's favour' and he ends his public ministry by being 'handed over to men'. He was not understood at either time though the disciples would later be brought to understand when he explained the scriptures to them, and how everything that happened to him was already foretold.

Christians live in a tension therefore. Our time of salvation is already here, today, for the promise of an eternal kingdom has been fulfilled. But it is not yet fully realised - we are already children of God, Saint John says, but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed. We shall be like him when we see him as he is. In the meantime we are called to continue following him in how we live, ready to take up the cross with him, whatever form it takes in the life of each of us.

No birth without blood. So we look forward to the glory and joy that is promised while paying attention to the warning of Jesus. The glory of God is revealed definitively, comprehensively and cosmically in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. There death is destroyed and eternal life triumphs. When he stretches out his arms on the cross and says 'it is consummated', the gates of the city of Zion are opened for all the nations.