Week 24 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Sirach 27:30-28:7 [27:33-28:9]; Psalm 103; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

This Sunday’s readings challenge two pieces of popular wisdom. The first is that a person who has had a particular negative experience will automatically be sympathetic and understanding towards another person having a comparable experience. Much pastoral care and counselling support operates on this basis and it seems reasonable. We expect that those who have experienced a particular loss or anxiety will be better placed to help others undergoing that loss or feeling that anxiety.

But the servant in the gospel parable has no sympathy for the man who owes him money even though his own creditor had just released him from a much greater debt. His action is astonishing to those looking on and it remains astonishing to us, to the point where we may well be unmoved by the torture to which he is subjected at the end. We might even find ourselves rejoicing in that torture and saying ‘well good enough for him’.

And here is the wonderful trap set by this parable, because we then find ourselves behaving as he did. Who is he except a character in a story with a fictional debt, and who are we except real sinners who have been released by God from a real debt, the consequence of our sins. We might imagine the wicked servant turning his head on the rack, looking towards us with bloodshot eyes, and saying ‘so you think you are different from me? Which of you, even though you have been released by God from the debt of your sins, has not sometimes refused to forgive others, has not borne grudges and nursed hurts, has not manoeuvred to get away with things yourself while calling others strictly to account?’

The other piece of popular wisdom challenged by the readings is that human beings make progress by forgiving and forgetting. Once again it seems reasonable, the advice often offered to people who cannot leave behind some sad experience or painful betrayal: ‘try to forgive and forget, you’ve got to move on and not allow this thing to continue to poison your life’. But the readings today tell us that forgiveness is possible not by forgetting the past but by remembering it, by remembering more about the past, and by remembering our present situation, and by remembering our future destiny. If popular wisdom says ‘forgive and forget’, biblical wisdom, coming to a climax in Christ, says ‘remember and so learn forgiveness’.

The wicked servant’s colleagues are astonished that he could so quickly forget the mercy he had been shown. If you or I find it difficult to forgive somebody, then we can begin here, by remembering the times we have been forgiven. The first reading, from the Book of Sirach, begins its teaching about forgiveness from this point. It is not reasonable to expect forgiveness and mercy if you are not prepared to show them. It is absurd to continue to ask mercy of God if you are not prepared to show mercy to others. We need to remember at least that much.

But there are other things we ought to remember as we try to forgive. Remember the end of your life, Sirach says, remember destruction and death. How will it seem looking back, we can imagine him saying, if you have not been able to find a way to forgive. Perhaps he is also reminding us of the judgement, that each of us must give an account of himself to God and where will we be then, anxious to be forgiven but not understanding what forgiveness means because we have not practised it ourselves.

Remember the commandments, Sirach continues, and remember the covenant of the Most High. ‘Do this in memory of me’, Jesus says at the last supper. Remember the covenant of the Most High, the new and everlasting covenant, sealed not by a (fictional) heartless servant stretched on the rack, but by the (real) Son of God nailed to the cross. If you want to learn forgiveness remember how the human heart of the Eternal Word was pierced. Remember how that blood dissolved the walls of hostility between people and established peace. It is not a case of forgiving and forgetting. It is a case of remembering, remembering many things, and so learning what forgiveness means.

Those who believe in Jesus are to be ambassadors of forgiveness in the world, and messengers of reconciliation. But forgiveness is not easy to do and the capacity to forgive is not one that is wilfully achieved. No matter how powerful we consider our willpower to be we cannot force ourselves into forgiveness. In the end it is a gift from God as Alexander Pope intimated in his famous comment that ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’. Perhaps it is not strictly speaking something we ‘do’ but something we find ourselves capable of experiencing, a fruit of the Holy Spirit in us, a sign of the life of Christ in us, a participation in the divine nature, a way of relating to others in which we find ourselves (by God’s grace) becoming compassionate as the Heavenly Father is compassionate.

Week 23 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: 1 Corinthians 10.14-22; Psalm 115; Luke 6.43-49

It is a wise criterion, clearly, coming from Christ himself, that it is by their fruits that the character and quality of a tree is known. When discerning about spiritual and religious claims and activities it is one o fht emost practical and useful of the criteria we can use. The only difficulty is that it operates post factum. In other words we have to wait and see how people act in order to judge the significance of their words and the charcter and quality of their hearts.

A lot of damage might have been done in the meantime, while we are waiting to see and discern. It has been so in cases of abuse - until a person's actions become known, abusers can continue to bear bad fruit, poisoning the lives of people, sometimes many other people. Once their actions are known, then they can be addressed and prevented from doing further harm.

Sometimes, though, the reputation of people for holiness or doctrinal orthodoxy, other criteria we might use, confuses situations and prevents people from believing that what they are hearing about their behaviour could possibly be true. Some situations, especially of what is termed 'spiritual abuse', arise where leaders or teachers are considered, either by themselves or by their followers, to be guru like and above the ordinary norms of morality. This can be about sexuality, or authority, or property - the three areas of life with which the vows of religion are concerned.

Jesus changes the imagery from trees bearing fruit to. buildings constructed on rock. This seems reliable from the beginning: if we know that the foundations of a person's spiritual and moral life are true and good, we can be confident that their words will be consistent and their actions trustworthy.

But the risks of living remain and uncertainties will continue to arise. Paul in the first reading is dealing with such an ambiguity in the early Church. If idols are nothing does it matter whether I have anything to do with their 'worship' or not? A contemporary form of the question is this: if I practise yoga exercises am I worshipping a false god? Most people would say 'don't be absurd, of course not'. But some Christians, and perhaps others, get anxious and believe such worship is implicit in the practice of yoga whether you think it is or not.

How are we to respond? If a yoga teacher is behaving immorally with her or his students it is one thing and the situation is clear. If the practice is for physical and mental health what is the problem, even if in some parts of the world yog continues to be used in religious rites?

The challenge from the readings today is to ensure coherence between heart and lips and hands, thoughts and words and actions. The place to begin is clearly with thoughts, that we seek to have the mind of Christ, that we know the treasure on which our heart is fixed, that we build our house on that desire. If we speak and act consistently with that foundation in our hearts and minds then we are, by God's grace, good trees bearing good fruit.

Week 23 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: 1 Corinthians 9.16-19, 22-27; Psalm 83; Luke 6.39-42

So two steps are needed if we are to see clearly. One is to accept that there is a beam in my eye which prevents me from seeing clearly. This may not be obvious and it may be difficult for me to accept. The second is to do whatever is needed to remove any such beam so as to see clearly.

What will convince me that there is a beam distorting my vision? Other people pointing it out to me will not work by itself. I can easily find motives for their criticisms (unless the comment is coming from a friend who we know really loves us). Perhaps people are moved by envy, or by some political manoeuvre on their part. In any case are they not subject to the same requirement, to take out of their own eye any beam that may be distorting how they see me?

So what will convince me? It seems I have to walk into a wall or fall down a hole before I will accept that there is some problem with my seeing. Figuratively speaking of course, on a spiritual level. Physically there are many other ways in which we become aware of problems with our eyesight.

But in how we see others, how we see life, how we see things generally, in the world and in the Church - for that kind of sight we need to be awakened somehow if a beam is distorting our vision. And who can do that for us in a way that we will accept? We need a fully trained disciple to show us the way and perhaps often this is how it happens. We are against a wall, or stuck in a hole, and we reach out for help. The wall and the hole are arranged by God's providence and so too is the fully trained disciple if such a one comes our way. We might wonder, with good reason, whether there is any such person apart from the Master himself, Jesus, our only Teacher.

Let's say we have reached the point, by whatever means, of accepting that we have a beam-in-the-eye problem. We must then face into the second stage of gaining clear vision, which is to remove the offending beam from our eye. Where the first stage is a matter of knowledge and understanding, this second stage is a matter of desire and will. Not just intelligence or insight but virtue and initiative. If I need docility above all to accept the first stage of healing, I need humility above all to accept the second stage.

It is why the gospel stories about blindness are so many and so pertinent. Not so bad to know you are blind, Jesus says in the Gospel of John, but much worse to think you can see when you cannot (John 9.39-41). The eye is the lamp of the body, he says elsewhere, but if that lamp is in darkness then you are comprehensively blind (Luke 11.34).

Let us think about these two steps towards seeing clearly. Let us ask God to help us to realise and accept the ways in which we are blind. And then to give us the grace and virtues we need to remove the beams that distort our vision so that we might see clearly what is there.

Week 23 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: 1 Corinthians 8:1-7, 11-13; Psalm 139; Luke 6:27-38

According to Saint Paul,  knowledge 'expands' and carries the danger with it of becoming egoistic and excluding. Knowledge swells our heads. It is confident, assertive and domineering. Love on the other hand 'builds up', not just expanding but including, not forgetting the other and his needs. Love opens our hearts and makes us sensitive to the impact of our knowledge on others.

The measure of these expansions and upbuildings, today's gospel reading tells us, is to be a measure we learn from God. We are to be compassionate as God is compassionate, merciful as God is merciful. We are called, therefore, to live in a very spacious place, to live within the (infinite) dimensions of the divine compassion.

Knowledge is knowledgeable and might well remain simply knowledgeable: expert, skilled, confident. Love however includes knowledge, embraces and transforms it. For love also knows, and understands, and is wise. Love's knowledge will feel more risky than mere knowedge does (skill, expertise, competence) because love's knowledge is more a matter of being known than of knowing. Love is in the first place, and fundamentally, about being known rather than knowing: 'if anyone loves God he is known by God'.

By knowledge we take the world inside ourselves and learn how to master and control it. By love we venture out into the world to taste it, to learn not so much how we might master it as how we might joyfully live in it. The pursuit of knowledge is one kind of adventure: we become masters of our universe. The pursuit of love is a very different kind of adventure: we step into God's universe and seek to live there by God's standards. Knowledge might well make progress without love but love cannot but include knowledge also.

Julian of Norwich says that 'by love may he be gotten and holden, but by thought never'. By love we come to know not only God and ourselves but also God's world, and the principles that rule it, and the others whom God loves.

Week 23 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: 1 Corinthians 7:25-31; Psalm 45; Luke 6:20-26

A common way of moral teaching in the ancient world is in terms of ‘two ways’, one leading on to success and happiness, the other to disaster and disappointment. It is used also in the Bible, which speaks of a way that carries a blessing and leads to life, and a way that carries a curse and leads to death. One is the narrow way of which Jesus speaks, leading to life, and the other is the broad way, leading to death. To place your trust in flesh and in what the world can offer is a way that leads to death, the prophet Jeremiah says. It means living, sooner or later, in a parched land. To place your trust in the Lord is to be like a tree planted near life-giving water, able to send its shoots to the water to find nourishment. Such a tree blossoms, and bears fruit.

                                                    

The form of the beatitudes given in the gospel of Luke follows this pattern of ‘the two ways’. Those who are poor and hungry, weeping and rejected, are blessed, Jesus says. Those who are rich and well fed, laughing and well thought of, are in difficulty. The true prophets experienced the former whereas the false prophets experienced the latter. People experiencing the former are obliged to place their trust in God and so they are like trees planted near life-giving water. People experiencing the latter find their meaning and significance in the world and will find themselves, sooner or later, living in a parched land. Somebody more beautiful will come along, or someone richer, or someone more influential, or someone younger … but the wise person finds the meaning and significance of their lives at some deeper place, where the divine water is to be found.

The paradox expressed in the beatitudes and woes of Luke 6 is most dramatically enacted in the paschal mystery of Christ. He is the seed sown in the ground. But the ground in which it is sown is watered from a divine source so that he springs to life again, life more abundant and more glorious. So when he speaks about the poor and hungry, about those who weep and are persecuted, he speaks about himself. And he knows the meaning and significance human life contains when it remains in touch with the divine water, blossoming (albeit in hidden ways) and bearing fruit (fruit that will last).

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary - 8 September

Readings: Micah 5.1-4a OR Romans 8.28-30; Psalm 12/13; Matthew 1.1-16,18-23

Who do you think you are? is a popular television programme. It was first broadcast on the BBC almost twenty years ago and was subsequently taken up by television channels in many countries. It answers to a deep and universal desire in human beings, to know something about our ancestors. My identity comes in large part from the generations that produced me, and I am naturally curious about them. On the tombstone of the Irish poet Seán Ó Ríordáin are inscribed the words 'Níl ionam ach ball de chorp san mo shinsir', 'all I am is a part of that body which is my people'.

When you go exploring you never know what you will discover and this is part of the drama of the television programme. There will probably be saints and scoundrels in my family history, suspicious gaps, unexplained appearances and disappearances, perhaps a famous (or infamous) person or two. The most memorable moments in the programmes are those that generate surprise or sadness, perhaps deep dismay or great delight.

Today the Church celebrates the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. It does so by reading his genealogy as it is given in Matthew's gospel. There are famous people there, Abraham and David, Solomon and Saint Joseph, and likewise names that mean nothing to us.

And the list includes five women, about each of whose appearance on the list there is something unusual. Tamar is the first, remembered for having seduced her father-in-law Judah, from which encounter was born Zerah, an ancestor of Jesus. Next comes Rahab, the mother of Boaz. She was a prostitute who helped the Hebrews in their conquest of Canaan. So not a lover of her own people, then, a heroine to the Hebrews and presumably not so to the Canaanites. But she is exalted by the early Christians as a woman of faith (Hebrews 11.31; James 2.25): she was on the 'winning side'.

Ruth is the third woman mentioned, one of the most attractive figures in the Bible, for her gentleness, loyalty, courage and generosity. What is odd about her is that she too was a foreigner, a Moabitess, who adds her blood to the lineage of the Davidic dynasty, and so also to Joseph and to Mary. If you are looking for racial or ethnic purity, you will not find it in the family of Jesus Christ!

Not mentioned by name - a skeleton in the cupboard? 'that woman'! - is Bathsheba, with whom David committed adultery having arranged for her husband to be killed. The mother of King Solomon, she is the first woman to be presented in the role of Queen Mother, a role that took on great importance as the house of David continued to rule.

There are also many things to be said about each of the men mentioned in the genealogy but the gospel of Matthew draws our attention particularly to the women.

Mary's oddness is described in the second part of today's gospel: 'this is how Jesus Christ came to be born', and we hear about his virginal conception. The point is not in the first place to highlight her purity against the backdrop of the family history, though it does that also, very effectively. The point is to remind us that within and through this very human history, with all its moments of light and darkness, God is working out his purpose. The Holy Spirit is at work in a unique way in the conception and birth of Jesus, clearly. But it is not the first time the power of God has been at work in the history of this family, for the same Spirit spoke through the prophets who guided them as he came mightily upon the kings of Israel when they were anointed.

We celebrate Mary because she is the mother of the Christ, the anointed One, the king of the house of David born of her to be the saviour and redeemer of all people. We also belong within this genealogy, therefore. This is who we think we are, parts of that body which is this people, the people of God, now the Body of Christ. The story continues in our lives, in the light and darkness we add to it. We are probably no better or worse than our ancestors, but the Spirit is always present, animating the body of which we too are members and guiding its history. If our contribution to the story includes moments of sadness and dismay, we pray, with Mary, that by God's grace we may also contribute in ways that will evoke surprise, delight and gratitude.

Week 23 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew18:15-20

Some years ago theologian Peter Candler published an article with the arresting title 'Outside the Church there is no Death'. What could he possibly mean? He meant that it is only within a Christian understanding of human experience that the full reality of death can be appreciated. Only the person with the theological virtue of hope, and the understanding of the human person that is required by such a virtue, can look death straight in the face and see its full horror.

Most of the time we believers join our contemporaries in denying, in various ways, the reality of death. We speak of it as if it were no big deal, just passing from one room to another, imagining life continuing more or less as before except without headaches or indigestion, without blood or sweat or tears. The person of hope on the other hand does not have such a picture with which to console herself. The direct object of our hope is God, not some future form of human life. The object of hope is God who is love and who is life, in whose Word we trust when he speaks to us of a share in his eternal life. But we know practically nothing about what that will be or how that will be except that it will be a life, that it will be a life of love, and that it will mean the company of Christ and the saints.

Just as you can only be really courageous when faced with something fearful, so you can only be really hopeful when faced with something that presents extreme difficulty. Just as fear and courage are not incompatible but require each other, so too sadness and anxiety on the one hand, and hope on the other, are not incompatible but require each other. In fact hope makes true sadness possible just as courage gives us a true appreciation of what we fear. This, I think, is what Candler meant in saying that outside the Church there is no death: only within a Christian understanding of human  experience can we taste fully the reality of negative things such as fear, anxiety, sadness and loss.

The gospel reading today is about excommunication, the sad and difficult situation where the Christian community comes to the conclusion that one of its members, for reasons of belief or lifestyle, is no longer in full communion with the Church. We prefer not to think about such things, as we prefer not to think about the reality of death. In fact excommunication is a kind of death, a terrible wound in the body of Christ, a real sadness and a profound loss. It means we have failed to maintain the communion to which Christ calls us and for which he prayed in his last great prayer to the Father.

The gospel reading says we are to try everything to maintain that communion: talking privately with a person first of all, talking with them in the presence of one or two other people, and only if it is absolutely necessary bringing a matter to the attention of the whole Church. The conclusion is chilling and we might even wonder 'is it Christian'? Surely we can find a way to stay together, to remain in communion? But truth presses in also, not in order to serve some structure of power or to maintain some artificial conformity. Truth presses in because it is the truth of that communion itself: what if the basis on which we are joined is undone by what a person believes or by how a person lives? Our communion dies.

This passage of Matthew's gospel is about the difficulty of staying together and it reflects how, even in the early Church, it was realized very quickly that there would be problems in staying together. Sometimes people will do things, or will come to believe things, that even the Church cannot see as compatible with the life of the gospel. Of course we hesitate to use the word ‘excommunication’ but in human relations it is sometimes, sadly, the reality. Even having done our best, we do not see how some can be contained within the life of the community. Some ways of living and some convictions are not compatible, as far as we can see, with life in the Church. More often than not it is people themselves who make the decision to separate from the Church because they no longer share its beliefs or are no longer convinced about the goodness of its teaching. Much more rarely the Church itself makes this decision about a person or a group of people.

We can never be happy about the exclusion of a brother or a sister. It is a death and death is terrible, the last enemy of human flourishing, a final failure. But within the context of Christian hope, exclusion can never be the last word about a person or about our relationship with them. They remain always children of the heavenly Father called to be brothers and sisters of Jesus. I like to think that the two or three gathered in Christ’s name at the end of this gospel reading are the same two or three who have earlier confronted the erring brother or sister. They are praying, and prayer is the characteristic act of the virtue of hope. What is on their minds as they pray must be that same brother or sister whom the Church has decided it must relate to as if he were a pagan or a tax-collector. And there is Christ in the midst of them.

Outside the Church there is no death because the Christian life makes us more sensitive to the truth of what death really is. But outside the Church, we can say, there is no outside, because the prayers of the Church, like the anxiety of loving parents, follow her children everywhere. Even when we cannot see how unity and reconciliation might come about, we must continue to hope for those things, to pray for those things, and to work for those things. All the commandments are summed up, Saint Paul says, in this saying: 'you shall love your neighbour as yourself'. We know that our neighbour is everyone, those who are living and those who are dead, those who are sick and those who are well, those who are in joyful communion with us and those who are in sad separation from us. We reach the limits of our capacities but we know that the Lord, who was crucified for our reconciliation, stretches his arms across the widest horizons of this creation in order to gather in all the scattered children of God.