Dedication of the Lateran Basilica -- 9 November

Readings: Ezekiel 47:1-2,8-9,12; Ps 46; 1 Corinthians 3:9c-11,16-17; John 2:13-22

The gospel of St John differs from Matthew, Mark and Luke in placing the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning rather than at the end of the public ministry of Jesus. For the synoptic gospels it is the last straw for his enemies, provoking his arrest and trial. For John it is the opening shot in his campaign, announcing the programme of Jesus' whole ministry. It declares, in effect, that the place of God's presence and the means of access to God is now Jesus himself and no longer the Temple in Jerusalem.

This overture to his ministry is also a key to reading John's gospel as a whole. The prophecies about Jerusalem, about the holy mountain on which God has chosen to dwell, about the Temple and the divine glory that resides there: all that is said about these things in the Old Testament is transferred to Jesus and fulfilled in what happens to him, specifically in what happens to his body. The gospel is organised around the great feasts of the Jewish liturgical year, Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication, whose meaning is consummated in the presence, teaching, sacrifice and saving work of Jesus.

Our feasts celebrating the dedication of churches are not in the first place about the physical buildings. It is good to have them, especially to have extraordinary buildings like the Lateran Basilica whose dedication we celebrate today. But the function of the buildings and their feasts is to serve the true 'temple of God', the 'body of Christ', the 'dwelling place of God' that the disciples of Jesus have become, the community of believers, the Church rather than the church.

The life of that temple and body is prayer, and the sabbath rest, with the sacrifice of Jesus at its heart, and the covenant sealed in his blood and represented each day in the celebration of the Eucharist.

The spiritual life of the people of God is the only 'commerce' worthy of this temple that we are, the exchange and relating whereby God abides with us and we receive Him in faith, hope and love.

And it is 'for all people', a universalism already announced in Isaiah and others of the prophets. This presence of God in Jesus Christ is not sectarian or exclusive but is for all. It is ecumenical and catholic, a call going out to the whole world to come and share in the life that is celebrated in these great buildings. This is particularly clear in celebrating today's feast of the Lateran, the Pope's cathedral, honoured as the mother church of all churches in the world.

Week 31 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 13:8-10; Psalm 112; Luke 14:25-33

The word that stops people in their tracks is the word hate. Jesus says, unless a person hates father and mother, wives and children, brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple.

Preachers pull back from it, interpreters of this passage pull back from it, and even translators try to find a way around it, translating it into English as 'preferring', or 'loving more than me'. But the Greek says hate, and it's strange, when one of the commandments says, we're to honour our father and our mother, that we hear Jesus saying, we must hate our father and our mother, if we want to think of following him. It is very strange.

Luke, of course, who in many ways is full of compassion and tenderness, and has a particular eye for human suffering and poverty, is also quite uncompromising. We find events and sayings in Luke's Gospel that we don't find anywhere else in the New Testament, many of them on the lips of Jesus, which are radical and uncompromising. It's the case in regard to riches, for example.

Luke is much clearer that riches themselves present followers of Christ with problems. And it's the same here in what he says about family relationships. There are passages in Luke's Gospel which tell us about Jesus' own relationship with his family, which seem to be along the same line as what he's saying in today's Gospel.

In Luke chapter 2, for example, the adolescent Jesus says to his parents, "how is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" When they find him after he's been lost for three days, it sounds a bit rude, cold. In Luke chapter 8, "your brothers and your mother are outside looking for you. Who are my mother and my brothers? Those who hear the word of God and keep it." That's a moment we hear about in Matthew and Mark as well. In Luke 11 - one we hear only in Luke - the woman raising her voice says "blessed the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked. Blessed rather the one who hears the word of God and keeps it", Jesus says.

His responses in all these occasions seem a bit cold and rude, not the kind of courtesy or gratitude we would expect that a son or a brother ought to express in relation to his family. In Chapter 4 of Luke, they ask "is this not Joseph's son" when he comes back to Nazareth, back to his own people and things don't go well. There's misunderstanding, there's resentment, there's rejection, perhaps there's even hatred.

In Luke chapter 9, people he calls to follow him say, "first let me go and bury my father" - "leave the dead to bury their dead", Jesus says. Another strange saying about family relationships not taking priority over people's relationship with him. And just a few weeks ago, we heard him talking about coming to bring division, not peace, and division particularly within families.

So Jesus, it seems clear, is not simply a purveyor of middle class values, although he has often been turned into that. He's not here to endorse the world as it is understood by the crowds following him. Multitudes are still following him at this point, we're told.

But he's not here simply to endorse their world. He is strange and different. And his call is not to us to find a place for him in our world, but a call to us to follow him into his world, where he has found a place for us. Our task is not to squeeze him and his message into our world, in which case we have to interpret away, hive off, cut away things that are too strange, too difficult. That's not our job, to squeeze him and his message into our world, but to follow him into his new world.

Luke's gospel is the gospel of great reversals. Hate those you're inclined to love, he seems to say to us in today's gospel. But just a few chapters earlier he asked us to love those we're inclined to hate, to love our enemies. The first will be last, and the last will be first. The one who humbles himself will be exalted, the one who exalts himself will be humbled. And there are parables of reversal which we find only in Luke, the rich man and Lazarus, their situations reversed in the next world. The Pharisee and the publican, the one who goes home justified is the one you wouldn't expect to go home justified. The prodigal son and the elder brother, the one who is celebrated by his father is not the one you would expect to be celebrated by his father.

So there are these great stories and teachings about reversal, about the world being turned upside down. How is it possible then to be a disciple of this teacher? It can seem too difficult, too paradoxical, even a bit weird, some of these things, he asks. How are we supposed to count the cost like the man building the tower? How are we to prepare sensibly like the king going out to war? If we want to follow Christ, how do we count the cost? How do we prepare sensibly? By renouncing all that you have, he says. It's a condition of absolute simplicity, costing not less than everything, to quote T.S. Eliot's way of putting it. We follow him by bearing our own cross, by hating what we're inclined to love, even our own life.

That alerts us to something. We're to hate not just father and mother, wives and children, sisters and brothers, but even our own life. So is there anything clear in the middle of these paradoxes and reversals? What is clear is that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to suffer and to die. That's clear. He's to be rejected by our world, which cannot find a place for him, which finds his message too difficult, too strange, too puzzling. There may be multitudes following him now, but by the time we get to Calvary, there would be very few, if any, who will remain behind.

Our world does not have a place for him, and we spit him out. But the great reversal of the resurrection breaks things open and turns the world finally and definitively upside down. It's no longer a question of us finding a place in our world for him, but of us following him into his world, where he has established a place for us. We must follow him into that mystery of the great reversal of his death and resurrection. In being baptised, we declare ourselves Christians, people who have taken the great reversal as the pattern of our lives. We die with him in order to come to new life in him.

So we have taken that great reversal and made it the pattern of our own lives. In being baptised, we're saying: this will be the criterion of my life, of my experience, of everything that happens to me, of all that I think, of all that I do, of all my relationships. This is the pattern, the criterion, against which I will evaluate everything.

In participating in the Eucharist, we allow this mystery of the great reversal to enter more deeply into us, as we taste already the gifts of the world that is to come. And we taste them along with our fathers and our mothers, with our wives and our children, with our brothers and our sisters, with all who share our faith in Christ. We are one with them in a new way.

Inevitably, we tend to domesticate Jesus, to take the harm out of him, to turn him into some kind of romantic teacher, harmless puppy, a moralist perhaps, at our disposal, in order to endorse the way we think things should be. And as we seek to domesticate Jesus, so too we seek to domesticate God. Today though, in this talk of hatred, Jesus keeps us awake and alert, keeps us unsure and watching, wondering about this, our God. A God who is wild and free. A God who is surprising and ever new in the mystery of his infinite love.

You can listen here to this homily being preached 

St Martin de Porres - 3 November

SON OF AN UNKNOWN FATHER

Foreword to Sr Maeve McMahon’s biography of St Martin de Porres

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At his canonization in May 1962, Saint Martin de Porres was presented to the world by Pope John XXIII as exemplifying what he, the Pope, desired for the Second Vatican Council, due to open a few months later. What we want from the council, he said, is a new incentive to members of the Church to live a better life, a life of greater holiness and virtue. The Council was to inaugurate a spiritual renewal in the first place, and in choosing to canonize Martin when he did, Pope John was holding him up as an example, a teacher and a guide for the Council’s work.

Far from his own time and place, then, this humble mixed-race man, was recognised not just as a hero of the Christian way but as a hero for our times too. He lived the great commandment – love God, love your neighbour – in a heroic way: that was the simple and profound ‘secret’ of his holiness.

During his lifetime Martin de Porres won the hearts of all who knew him, whatever their race, origin or social position. Personally he had to negotiate some of the deepest prejudices with which the human race lives: racial, social, cultural. Sixty years after his canonization, Martin still helps us in responding to the great challenges the world continues to face. Racism, for example, in regard to which Martin has always been a particular comfort to those who suffer under it and a particular challenge to those who would promote it. As a lover of animals and a man close to nature, using its resources to bring healing to the sick, he stands with Francis of Assisi as a champion in the care of creation. As a man of many cultures he shows us how to live inter-culturally, allowing the simple teaching of the Gospel to strengthen our appreciation of diversity and our recognition of equality among all human beings. Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America, knows well the history of marginalization and exclusion that has marked the experience of the people of that continent. But he also knows well how holiness lived at the peripheries and on the margins, the kind of holiness Martin represents, will transform the whole Church as Martin helped to transform the Church in Peru during his lifetime.

Martin’s wisdom – ‘he is a learned man’, one of his Dominican confreres said about him – flowed from his faith, his love for God, and the particular graces that God gave him. His response in every situation came directly from his lifelong friendship with God, creator of all and saviour of all. Martin saw everybody and everything in that theological light. Like Jesus, whom he loved with his whole heart from his earliest years, he wanted to be a bearer of love and a maker of peace in the violent world in which he found himself.

Learning from Martin, then, why would we ever make distinctions that exclude or oppress others? Why would we ever fail to welcome strangers, feed the hungry, visit the sick? Why would we ever fail to appreciate the variety in all that God has made since, in seeing it all, God found it to be ‘very good’?

Sister Maeve McMahon now follows up her lovely life of Saint Dominic, published some years ago, with this fresh and energetic retelling of the life of Saint Martin de Porres. For the reasons already given Martin is very much a saint for our times and Sister Maeve’s account of his life – simple and inspiring, in places surprising and thought-provoking – will help a new generation to know, to love, and to be challenged by this great man, Martin of Charity. We read that he was able to enter even where doors were locked. May this account of his life nourish minds and open hearts so that, for a new generation, Martin will be a leader, a teacher and a guide in the way of holiness.

All Souls -- 2 November

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

 

There is a tendency these days to sentimentalise death, to act and speak as if it were no big thing, just a ‘passing on’ or a ‘passing away’, a move into ‘the next room’ or an easy translation to ‘a better place’. There is often much laughter, especially at Irish funerals, teasing one another about what the dead person might be doing or thinking, having a pint of Guinness or watching the Cheltenham Gold Cup, for example.

All this is a way of comforting one another in difficult times. But it might also be a way of denying the full reality of what has happened. Popular films sometimes do this by having the ‘spirit’ of a person hovering over the places where they lived and telling us the story of the days and weeks that preceded their ‘passing’. As if they had not really died.

Some might think it a Christian thing to think about death in these terms, to speak of death as no big deal. Is it not one of the main beliefs of Christianity, our belief in an 'afterlife'? Is it not the high point of the comfort that religion is supposed to offer, this confidence about what happens after death?

In one sense death is a natural end to the life of the human animal and can be, very often, a happy release. But in another sense death is an unnatural experience because we are spiritual creatures who already sense something of eternity in ourselves. Our experiences of knowledge and love have something of the eternal about them, as philosophers and poets have often seen, and recounted. Death is an insult to something we sense about ourselves, an affront and a scandal.

And many people cannot enter into the levity, the false comfort, because they find the absence of someone they have loved unbearably sad. There is a terrible poignancy in being reminded of them, realising they are not in their accustomed place. Widowed men and women, orphaned children, bereaved parents, often have to bear privately the intense pain of feeling that a part of their own bodies has been taken away, a gap has been opened that can never again be filled, a wound has been inflicted for which there is no healing. They don’t want to go on and on about it ... and people wonder why they are not getting over it.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is a statement about God more than about ourselves or about stages of human existence. This is because faith, as Christians understand it, always has God as its direct concern. This is one reason for calling it a theological virtue. It means that whatever falls within the reach of faith does so only because it has something to do with God, it teaches us something about God.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is an aspect of faith in God the Holy Spirit, whom in the Creed we call 'the Lord, the giver of life’. The Latin term is beautiful: the Spirit is vivificantem, the vivifier. The God in whom we believe is Creator and Lord of all things, God of the living and not of the dead. The God in whom we believe wants life not death. God causes the wilderness to blossom and the barren womb to bear fruit.

The God in whom we believe is the Father who raised his Son Jesus from the dead and exalted Him in the Spirit to his own right hand. The Father allowed his only Son to enter the kingdom of the dead, to dwell amongst the dead and to rise from there. ‘I was dead’, Christ says, ‘but now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of hell’.

Our faith and hope are about God, what God is like, where God is in human experience, who it is God has promised to be for His people. For those who believe in God, the awful journey into loss, decline, and death is one Jesus has travelled before us, one through which we travel with Jesus, one from which all who belong to Jesus will be raised, as he was, by the power of God.

Our faith is not in an 'afterlife' but rather in the 'future life', 'the life of the world to come' as we say in the creed. It is not just a continuation of what we experience now but rather a new life which we might glimpse already from time to time, in our experiences of love particularly, but whose full reality we cannot imagine.

 

Rather than turning death into ‘no big thing’, Christian faith in the resurrection of the body enables us to face death in all its reality and sadness. Rather than pretending that death is not terrible and sad, Christian hope in the resurrection of the body looks that horror and sadness squarely in the face. Our faith and our hope is that God, who is with us in dying, rescues us from the kingdom of the dead to bring us into his own eternal life.

To believe in the resurrection of the body, then, is to believe something about God. It is to affirm that God is the God of life. It is also to say something about the reach of our hope. Founded on God's power, and on what God has already done in raising Jesus from death, our hope stretches ‘from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven’.

All Saints -- 1 November

Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; Psalm 24; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

People are still unsettled by the gaps in the year: the move from winter into spring, new year, mid-summer, mid-winter. Where the seasons change not only can we expect colds and small ailments but other uncertainties also. What about darkness, storms and snow? Are we prepared for the time ahead? Many customs survive that mark the crossing of these gaps and the negotiation of these uncertainties. The gaps need to be filled, the bridges crossed, one part of the year linked with the next, perhaps spirits need placating. In the face of such moments of fear and threat, people often cope by making lots of noise, lighting fires, and dressing up, mimicking the spirits to frighten them off before they can frighten us.

Halloween takes us from autumn into winter, and continues to gather many such rituals to itself. The fact that in the northern hemisphere we are moving from light into darkness makes this transition more frightening than most. In the Christian calendar we celebrate All Saints and All Souls on the first two days of November. The saints are the men and women who stand in the gaps of the year, who fill gaps, build bridges, keep things going. When I was a novice I remember a prior thanking a departing brother for 'filling a gap'. It seems there was not much to say about his preaching or the other things he was involved in, his great contribution had been to fill a gap. It did not seem much at the time and was even amusing since the departing brother was quite portly. But perhaps filling a gap is a more profound, more important role than it seems at first.

Christ is the one who fills the most threatening of gaps. A new Moses, he stands in the breach (Ps 106:23; Amos 7:7) that alienates human beings most fundamentally from God. He is the just one who stands in the gap on behalf of the people (Ezekiel 22:30; 13:5), the mediator who negotiates on their behalf, the one who secures the wall of the city. Crucified on a hill just outside the city wall, his body points in every direction. He is the still point of the turning world, the rejected stone that has become the foundation stone, the one who enters into the deepest darkness of the great gap of death and causes light to shine there. He stands at the gate, a crucified hero, saviour of his people, the breach-mender.

At All Saints we celebrate all those people, especially the ones who have not become famous, who have filled gaps with the love of Christ. We all know two, or five, or eight such people, not known perhaps to any other of our friends. So already that is a lot of good people who in small, ordinary, but very important ways have done this: by helping the poor, teaching the ignorant, comforting the sorrowful, helping sinners to be reconciled, encouraging the downcast, forgiving injuries, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and so on. These are all significant gaps which are filled by friendship and love. The saints are those who bring hope where there is despair, light where there is darkness, pardon where there is injury, and love where there is hatred.

The saints are those marked with the sign of the cross, the sign of the just man standing in the gap. They are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart, hungering and thirsting for justice. They weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, They show mercy and they make peace. Understood in these ways there is nothing better that we can say about those who have gone before us: the good and holy people we have known filled gaps, and filled them with faith and hope and love.

Week 30 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings : Romans 8:31-39; Psalm 109; Luke 13:31-35

Like the closing movement of a great Mahler symphony the last part of Romans 8 concludes not just that extraordinary chapter but the whole of the first part of the Letter to the Romans. The crescendo is dramatic, heart-warming, extraordinary, profoundly moving.

'With God on our side who can be against us?' is the first part of this closing movement. We have met those who are against us, sin and death and the law, but we have also met the response of God to these enemies of humanity: the sending of His Son to die for us and the gift of His Spirit to transform us. There is no contest in the end. The only one entitled to condemn us is the one who died for us, was raised from the dead, and now stands and pleads for us. (Stephen in Acts 7 also speaks of Jesus standing in the presence of God: it is the position of the advocate, the one pleading a case on another's behalf.)

'Nothing therefore can come between us and the love of Christ'. This is the second part of the final movement. An intimacy has been established between humanity and the love of God, a direct contact, an unmediated presence. St Thomas Aquinas says that this is why we do not expect any further revelation from God. What more is to be revealed? What more is to be achieved? He turns to Hebrews rather than Romans but to make this same point: there is nothing that can come between us and the mercy seat of God. Jesus has carried his own blood into the heavenly Holy of Holies - no greater sacrifice can be imagined, no closer connection, no greater intimacy, no deeper communion. On the strength of what Christ has done we can face into any trouble, from within or from without, any need or want, any threat or attack.

'For I am certain ...' Paul begins the final section, 'that nothing ...', and he gives a litany of the created powers and forces that might conceivably come between us and the love of God. But none of them can do that, not death or life, no angel or prince, nothing that is or is yet to come, no power, height, depth, or anything at all in creation can ever come between the human soul and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It seems that there might be one thing that could do it and Jesus speaks about it in today's gospel reading. 'I longed to gather you as a hen gathers her brood, but you refused'. 'You would not' is another translation, or 'you willed it not'. Is it really the case that the created, and so finite, human will is capable of preventing what God, in His infinite goodness, wants us to have? It seems that it is so, that we really are free with this kind of potentially self-destroying freedom. And it would be hell, that choice, to place ourselves outside the intimacy achieved by the blood of Christ.

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, uses a lovely word to illustrate her confidence that God fully respects human freedom. Our freedom is the supreme way in which He has made us to be like Him, capable of love, but also that which makes hell possible, a final refusal of that love. In her own version of Paul's crescendo she says: 'Human freedom can be neither broken nor neutralized by divine freedom, but it may well be, so to speak, outwitted. The descent of grace to the human soul is a free act of divine love. And there are no limits to how far it may extend.'

You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced: so the prophet Jeremiah. Outwit me Lord, and let me be outwitted, is a prayer one might make using Edith Stein's words. In the strength of this prayer we can return to Paul's certainty. If God is for us, who can be against us? Not even we ourselves. Nothing can come between us and the love of God in Christ, no, not even we ourselves. For the intimacy into which we have been brought is love, and love is only true where it is free, freely given and freely received. And, as Paul tells us elsewhere, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

So let us welcome Jesus in his desire to gather us in. Let us be joyful in the gift of the Son. Let us say, 'yes, Lord, I will it, to receive your gifts, to be outwitted, to be carried along into the glorious music of your eternal love'.

Week 30 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 8:26-30; Psalm 13; Luke 13:22-30

The readings present us with a number of puzzles. The first one is between the first reading and the gospel. Paul teaches us that even if we do not know how to pray as we ought the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. God who knows everything in our hearts hears the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit, pleas that are according to the will of God. The gospel by contrast presents us with a picture of God refusing to open the door to some of those who come knocking: 'I do not know where you come from', he says.

This is doubly confusing for it not only sets up this contrast between the two readings today but it seems to contradict what Jesus taught earlier in the gospel, in particular 'knock and the door will be opened to you'. It must mean that what is being asked for when the door remains closed is not according to the will of God, it is not an interpretation by the Spirit of the desires of the human heart. So what is wrong with it? What enters in to deflect this prayer and make it powerless? Is it another example of the prayer of the Pharisee that we heard about last Sunday, a praying which is only 'to himself' and not to God?

It must be that there is something wrong with the question, 'will those who are saved be few'. Like the Pharisee praying in the Temple, the questioner has his eye on other people. He does not ask 'will I be saved' which seems to be the only relevant question in this regard. A particular kind of interest in the question of salvation is a distraction from the main business of following Jesus. To make it a speculative question, one for the theological armchair, is indecent when it is an urgent question, a real question, about the well-being of human beings, now and in the world to come. For the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar this question is not only indecent, it is contrary to the supreme law of charity. Charity, loving all men and women as Christ loves them, obliges us to hope for the salvation of them all, their eternal well-being. If I want to ask this kind of question it should only be in relation to my salvation that I should ask it.

Balthasar learned this, of course, from the gospels. So in today's passage Jesus turns the question back on the questioner: 'will you be saved?' Do you know the way to the door? Do you know how to live so that when you arrive at the door you will be recognised as a member of the household? So we must not presume - a presumption implied in the original question, it seems. Worry about your own salvation, and what is needed now, if you are to prepare for it.

There is much about doors in the New Testament, the door that will open when we knock and today's door that will remain closed when we knock. In John's gospel Jesus describes himself as the door, the way by which the sheep enter and leave the sheepfold. In the Book of Revelation he is the one who comes knocking on our door and it is up to us to open: 'behold I stand at the door and knock'.

Once again Jesus presents a paradox: 'some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last'. If we want to play a certain game, and enter into the mathematics of salvation, then we are, once again, standing alongside the Pharisee in the Temple measuring his performance against that of the Publican. Which of them is first and which last? Instead let us travel with Jesus towards Jerusalem where these puzzles, paradoxes and questions find their mysterious resolution. The Cross of the Lord, the tree of life, is also the key that unlocks the mystery of the divine love and mercy. This is how the door is opened, by him sacrificing himself for all who are unworthy to enter. Through him they are redeemed and made children of God by the Spirit, and so they can turn up at the door and be recognised as part of the household, sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father, adopted as brothers and sisters of the Lord by the gift of the same Spirit. We will not then arrive confident and presumptuous, comparing ourselves with others, and wondering about their salvation. We will arrive speechless and hesitant, not knowing how to pray as we ought, overwhelmed by the gift we are receiving, the infinite mercy of God. The Spirit will then bear witness with our spirit that we are indeed children of God, no longer servants and slaves but sons and daughters, no longer outsiders but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of heaven.

The Magnificat antiphon for 20 December gives us another related image. Jesus is the Key of David, the one who comes to lead the captive from prison, to free those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. Through the work of Christ, all human beings - this is our hope - are made able to take a place at the feast in the kingdom of God.