Lent Week 2 Saturday

Readings: Micah 7:14-15, 18-20; Psalm 102; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

'A man had two sons ...' Thus begins one of the greatest stories ever told, that of the prodigal son. It is sometimes now called the story of the prodigal father, or even the story of the elder brother. All three characters are important and teach us something essential about ourselves, about our relationships with others, and about God.

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch priest and writer in spirituality. One of his last works is also one of his most popular books, a long meditation on the parable of the prodigal son using the text of Luke 15 and a painting by Rembrandt, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, which is in St Petersburg. (Nouwen’s book is entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. A Story of Homecoming, and was published by Darton, Longman and Todd in 1992.)

The younger son is the best known character in the story, the one who is anxious to leave home and go away and have a good time and see the world. His request for his inheritance says to his father, in effect, ‘it’s time you were dead’. One can imagine the kind of wound that must be to a father. Yet he lets him go. The son’s departure is a radical rejection of ‘home’. In his eagerness to be gone, he has become deaf to the voice of love.

Worse is to follow as he wastes what he has been given, falls on hard times and finds himself — horror of horrors for a Jew — reduced to looking after pigs. Worse still is his hunger to eat even what the pigs were eating. It is difficult to imagine anybody sinking lower. He is completely lost, his plans and dreams in tatters round his feet (like his shoes in Rembrant’s painting), adrift in an alien and foreign land.

But ‘he came to himself’. What does this mean? It is the turning point of his story and so is worth pondering. Nouwen interprets it as meaning ‘he remembered whose son he was’. He remembered his father. He is unable to claim anything more from his father who has already given him his share of the inheritance. All he can stand on is the fact that he is the son. It is true he has messed up his life. He feels unworthy to be counted now as his father’s son but perhaps the father will take him back as a servant in his household. And so he takes the long journey home, ‘long’ at least in terms of the moral courage it required.

Some people will find it easy to identify with the rake, the younger son. I suspect, though, that more of us see ourselves in the older one and sympathise with his position. After all he has been working hard for his father, stayed with him, tried to do his best, looked after the family property ... and when this wastrel comes home, having destroyed a goodly portion of the family’s property, the father welcomes him back like a hero and throws a great feast in his honour!

The elder brother has the more difficult task, to try to ‘come home’ to his brother in spite of resentment and bitterness. He refuses to join the party. He cannot enter into that joy. There is a great tragedy here, a good person finds himself alienated from ‘home’, struggling with things from which it is more difficult to be converted.

We are not told whether the elder son was able to make the journey required of him. Perhaps this is because the story is addressed also to us and presents us with this question: are you to be reconciled with your father and brother, with your mother and sister? The story of the elder son does not end on a page of the gospel text but in the life of each of us as we struggle with similar difficulties.

We are told that the father appealed to the elder son to ‘come to himself’. Disowning his brother (and father?) the elder son refers to the prodigal as ‘your son’. In reply the father refers to him as ‘your brother’. Like his brother, the elder son needs to remember who he is, where he belongs, where ‘home’ is. He must let go of rivalry, learn to trust, be grateful, and share in the common joy, the ‘sound of angels cheering’ as a sinner repents and returns to the household.

The third character in the story is the father, old and, in Rembrandt’s painting, almost blind, but full of compassion, watching out for his son and rushing to meet him before he arrives at the house. He represents for us the heart of God which is rich in mercy and open to all equally, the first and everlasting love which has brought us into being and sustains us in all our ways even when those ways involve journeys through selfishness and ruin, through resentment and bitterness. We may see ourselves in one of the sons (or in both). But we must also come to be like the father, ‘compassionate as our heavenly father is compassionate’. 

This homily was first published in the newsletter of St Dominic's Priory, London

Lent Week 2 Friday

Readings: Genesis 37:3-4,12-13,17-28, ; Psalm 105; Matthew 21:33-43,45-46

Joseph, the son of Jacob, is one of the Old Testament personalities whose experience becomes a figure or 'type' of the experience of Jesus. He was an innocent person, betrayed by his brothers, and handed over to death. In the parable read today we hear of a son sent to tenants by the owner of a vineyard, thinking they will respect him. But he is killed by them.

The most interesting thing in the readings is the contrast between the people's answer to Jesus' question and his own answer to it. The question is, 'what will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants?' The people say two things: he will put the wretches to a miserable death, and he will hand over the vineyard to other tenants who will make it fruitful for him.

Jesus also says two things. The second part of his answer is more or less the same as the second part of the people's answer: the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce fruit. But look at the first part of Jesus' answer. There is no reference to any miserable death, to the destruction of the wretches. Instead he quotes Psalm 118, 'the stone rejected by the builders has become the corner stone, the Lord's doing, marvelous in our eyes'.

There is a world of a difference between the first part of the people's answer and the first part of Jesus' answer. In fact two completely different understandings of God are presented. Jesus quotes a passage that is central to the Easter preaching of the Church: after Easter we will hear this passage again and again, the stone rejected has become the keystone. This is the response of the Father of Jesus to the killing of the Son. The 'owner of the vineyard' in the parable reflects a pagan understanding of God: he is just a more powerful human capable of greater destruction but moved by the same sentiments, the same logic of revenge, a powerful participant in the cycle of violence that haunts the world.

But Jesus came to reveal the true God to us, God who is alive, all powerful and eternal, Creator of all things and Redeemer of all. This God is free of the sentiments that determine our reactions. God is free of the logic that governs our relationships. His anger he expresses not in death and destruction but in resurrection and new creation.

We find it easier to live with the pagan gods. Their nature and action is more easily grasped by us because they are just overgrown men (or women). Often this is the kind of god we are living with even when we use the terminology of Christian faith. But the true God is something else, radically other than all this, with a nature and an action that are both simply described as 'love'. Jesus opens a window for us through which we can glimpse already this new God whom he has come to teach us about. God the Father of Jesus expresses infinitely more powerfully his profound anger at the death of His Son, giving vent to His anger not through further destruction of creation, but through resurrection, through a new creation.

Lent Week 2 Thursday

Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; Luke 16:19-31

There is a sting in the tail of both readings today. At first sight they seem very familiar and easy to receive. There is the beautiful image in Jeremiah of the tree planted by the side of the water, an image repeated in the psalm. The man who looks to the Lord is like such a tree compared with the one who puts his trust in the powers and values of this passing world, and who finds himself withering at the root, trying to survive in a parched land. There is the story of the rich man and Lazarus, which seems to repeat the same moral: trust not in the wealth of this passing world but in the true riches which are to be found in heaven with God.

The sting in the tail of the first reading is the sudden reflection on the perversity of the human heart: tortuous, beyond remedy, who can understand it? In other translations the heart is devious above all things and desperately corrupt. So the beautiful comparison presented earlier in the reading, the contrast between the tree planted by the water and the tree trying to flourish in the desert, which seems like an easy and obvious choice, is not so easily pursued, considering the perversity of the heart.

The sting in the tail of the gospel reading is the curious comment that if people do not believe what is given to them in the scriptures, neither will they believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. And it seems to amount to the same thing. It is easy to understand the choice you are facing, not so easy to make that choice and to persevere in it.

Lent is a time to think again about the mystery of sin. We can use the word 'mystery' advisedly: sin is a theological reality, an evaluation of human thoughts, words, actions and omissions in the light of God's holiness. The Bible presents us with two main traditions about sin and they remain accurate descriptions of our experience of this mystery.

On the one hand sin is something deliberately chosen, a human choice, made with awareness and freedom, choosing what is evil in preference to what is good. We should be grown up enough to accept responsibility for such things and to ask forgiveness for them.

On the other hand there is something mysterious about sin, which is a power at work in us and through us while not being completely under our control. It is connected with desire and the distortions of desire. It is connected with the phantasies that inevitably arise in the human mind and that are the roots of the deadly sins: pride and envy, lust and anger, gluttony and covetousness, sloth and vainglory. It is the power which Paul catalogues along with the Law and Death as the enemies of humankind, sin crouching at the door, disturbing our thinking and our choosing so that we end up doing the evil we do not want to do.

The choice is clear enough: sink your roots by the water's edge and flourish or go off into the wilderness and perish, put your trust in the Lord and the riches he promises and not in this world's wealth and power. It is more difficult to make the right choice and to stay with it. Desire, addiction, humiliation, fear, the complexities of the heart and its waywardness - all of this is always present also, nudging and pulling us, distracting and paralysing us.

Clearly we need to pray ever more urgently for the grace of conversion, a conversion established not on the strength of our own feeble efforts but one that comes as a gift from God, a compelling and life-changing encounter with His goodness, an encounter already available to us in the words of the Scriptures. If we do not listen to Moses and the prophets neither will we be persuaded even if someone were to rise from the dead. The devious heart would quickly find another explanation for it and return to its sad self-absorption.

Lent Week 2 Wednesday

Readings: Jeremiah 18:18-20; Psalm 31;  Matthew 20:17-28

The focus of the Scripture readings at Mass begins to  move around a bit more. For the first two weeks of Lent we hear lots about the call to conversion, the works of penance, and the need for moral and spiritual renewal. Of course Christ is often spoken about also, as a teacher of moral and spiritual living, and as an example for us to imitate.

But now, at first tentatively and later more decisively, the focus shifts away from ourselves, and what we can or should be doing, and settles finally on Jesus himself, on his journey to Jerusalem, on the intimations of his passion, finally on his suffering and death, coming to a climax on Good Friday. The focus is, more and more, simply on Jesus as we are invited to meditate on who he is and on the significance of his suffering and death. To help us with this meditation the Church's liturgy presents us with a series of figures from the First Testament whose innocent suffering has become a type or prefigurement of the suffering of Jesus.

Today, for example, we are presented with Jeremiah, one of the prophets whose life was threatened in Jerusalem, and who suffered persecution even if he was not actually killed. We will be reminded later in Lent of Joseph, sold into slavery, of the virtuous man who provokes the envy and anger of the unwise, of Jeremiah again, thrown into a cistern, of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three young men cast into a fiery furnace, and of Susanna, a young woman unjustly accused whose trial anticipates that of Jesus.

In this context the request of the mother of James and John is all the more dissonant. She strikes the wrong note completely. She opens her mouth and puts her foot in it. In Mark's gospel it is the apostles themselves who are out of touch with what Jesus is saying; Matthew spares their blushes by blaming their mother!

Words that clash. The persecutors of Jeremiah want to hang him with his own words. Nothing will be lost to us by shutting this guy up, they say, we will still have instruction, counsel, prophetic words. Yes, but not the full and authentic word of the Lord that is coming to them now through Jeremiah. He appeals to his service in words, speaking to God whom he had earlier addressed on behalf of the people who are now persecuting him.

Jesus stands in that tradition of prophets persecuted in Jerusalem. That is now clearly his destination, the capital, the centre of political power, the focus of religious faith. James and John, or their mother, like the sound of that, and ask for good places in the kingdom that is coming. But it is a kingdom in reverse, where the chalice to be drunk is the chalice of suffering, where the greatest is the servant of all, where the slave is the first of all, and where the one who gives his life as a ransom for many is the one who understands the heart of God most deeply. 'Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit'.

Lent Week 2 Tuesday

Readings: Isaiah 1:10, 16-20; Psalm 49; Matthew 23:1-12

Is it hypocritical to go on preaching the gospel if you do not practise it? It would seem so. However, Jesus' judgement of the Pharisees is not exactly that. Although 'they preach but do not practise' Jesus says that the people should still listen to what they say, and follow their teaching, but not follow their practice.

What about teachers in the Church? We can apply the same judgement to them (to us). A wise older friend once put it to me this way: if we only preach what we practise then we will not preach the gospel for who among us lives the gospel in its fulness? We must go on preaching the gospel accepting always that the first listener to our preaching, the first target of our call to live the gospel way, is ourselves.

Where people sincerely struggle with their weaknesses they can speak, sometimes even more powerfully, about the gospel (after all, the heart of the gospel is mercy). But who among us can claim to be sincere ('without wax' is its literal meaning) authentic and genuine through and through? Which of us does not have something of the hypocrite, some pretence, some mask, some moral weakness, that we try to cover up with false confidence?

Lent Week 2 Monday

Readings: Daniel 9:4-10; Psalm 78; Luke 6:36-38

We are still in that first part of Lent where the liturgy speaks of conversion from our sins and returning to the Lord, about the works of Lent, prayer, fasting and alms-giving. Once again we are reminded that these are not three independent activities but that each is involved in the other two.

What is added today is a reference to the measure by which we want to be measured in regard to these things, our relationship with ourselves, with others and with God. Jesus implies that we are free to choose this measure, reminding us that what we become accustomed to as counting for justice and compassion will also become our criterion for receiving the justice and compassion of God. Of course in relation to ourselves and in our dealings with God we will want to be dealt with according to the divine measure. The question is whether we manage to use the same measure in our dealings with others, forgiving as we have been forgiven, showing compassion as we have received compassion, etc.

So we are free to choose. But there is also God's proposal of a measure, in the Law and the teachings of the prophets and above all, now, in the teaching and life of Jesus. This is the measure God offers us, the translation into human relationships and affairs of the divine mercy.

So that's the thought for today, the measure by which we will be measured. We are free to choose it. It will then become our capacity for receiving as much as for giving compassion. The measure proposed to us by the Law, the Prophets, and the Messiah is the one that promises greatest freedom for it asks us to be compassionate as our Heavenly Father is compassionate.

Lent Sunday 2 (Year A)

Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 33; 2 Timothy 1:8b-10; Matthew 17:1-9

We hear about the temptations of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent each year, and we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus on the second Sunday of Lent each year. This year is the turn of Matthew’s gospel, but it is instructive to think about what each of the evangelists decides to omit and what he decides to include compared with the other two accounts of the same experience.

Matthew, for example, does not show Peter and the other two disciples to be quite as dim as they can seem in Luke and Mark. The comment that Peter, always the first to open his mouth, ‘did not know what he was talking about’ is omitted by Matthew. He is generally kinder in his account of the disciples anyway, certainly kinder than Mark who presents them as forever getting the wrong end of the stick.

In this, Matthew’s approach fits with one aspect of what the transfiguration means, that it is a moment of re-assurance for the disciples. It happens, he tells us, ‘six days later’. Six days later than what? Six days after Jesus had told them for the first time that he was to go to Jerusalem, to be rejected and condemned, to suffer and to be put to death. The transfiguration is a moment of re-assurance and encouragement for them to continue following Jesus even in view of what Jesus had begun to say to them about his destiny. It is a divine endorsement of the way Jesus is going and of what he is saying about his mission.

The scene is richly loaded with traditional and familiar figures, scenery and texts. Of course the disciples knew who Moses and Elijah were. The scenery – on a mountain, with an overshadowing cloud and a voice – immediately evokes an experience of the divine presence. They surely understood something also of the significance of the words spoken from the cloud. The beloved son with whom God is well pleased, is referred to by Isaiah and others of the prophets. They might well have been familiar also with Moses’ prophecy in the Book of Deuteronomy about a great prophet, whose authority would be comparable to that of Moses himself. ‘Listen to him’, Moses had said, providing words for the divine voice at the transfiguration.

But if the characters and scenery and words of this dramatic moment are all familiar, the meaning of their being brought together in this way, and the one around whom they are brought together, makes of this an experience of something radically new. Although each of its elements is anticipated in the Old Testament, there is nothing quite like it in the Old Testament. What Jesus is helping the disciples to do is to make the transition from the ways in which they understood life and God and themselves up to then to a completely new way of understanding life and God and themselves in the future. The journey they are being asked to take is solidly rooted in all that they had been taught about the God of Israel and yet it is a journey that will transform them completely as regards what they thought and how they lived. It is at once familiar and completely mysterious so their fear is understandable.

Related to this is another detail of Matthew’s account, which is not mentioned in either Luke or Mark. Jesus, he tells us, touched them and told them to stand up. They have done what human beings ought to do in the presence of God: bowed down, fallen on their knees and put their faces to the ground. But the great outcome of the adoration of God, as distinct from the adoration of anything that is less than God, is that we stand up greater for having worshipped.

Whenever we worship something less than God we must hand over some of our identity to that thing. We are then less than we might be for having worshipped an idol. It may be money or power or a group of people or a political ideology or a religious organisation or some vague abstraction– to worship an idol, a false god, always makes us less than what we are. We must pay tribute to whatever it is we worship in that way. We must invest something of ourselves and such false gods have big appetites.

But to adore God does not mean losing anything of our identity. In fact it means the opposite, for we are not rivals to God and God is not a rival to us. To worship God is to live in the truth. This is the reality of our situation, that we are the creatures and servants of God, called to follow the way of His Son. In the presence of God, the Son says to us ‘stand up’. Already we get a glimpse of the greatness that is being revealed, not only the greatness revealed in Jesus but the greatness revealed in Him for us. The second reading speaks of it as ‘the power of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling not in virtue of our works but in virtue of his own purpose and the grace he gave us in Christ Jesus ages ago’.

Romano Guardini, a theologian working in Berlin at the height of Nazi power there, decided with colleagues and friends to try to disseminate statements to counter-act what was happening. He decided to write first about adoration, for adoration, he says, is ‘the safeguard of our mental health, of our inmost intellectual soundness’. ‘Whenever we adore God’, he writes, ‘something happens within and about us. Things fall into true perspective. Vision sharpens. Much that troubles us rights itself. We distinguish more clearly between good and evil. … We gather strength to meet the demands which life imposes upon us, fortified at the very core of our being, and taking a firmer hold upon truth’.

To fall on our knees before God expresses the truth of our situation. To be enabled to stand up in the presence of the same God, at the invitation of His beloved Son and through His saving work, is the wonderful grace that has been manifested through the appearing of Jesus our Saviour.