Week 28 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 4:22-24, 26-27, 31-5:1; Psalm 113;  Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? For Luke, it is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites that is the sign for those listening to Jesus. The Queen of Sheba came to hear Solomon’s wisdom and the people of Nineveh heard Jonah’s preaching. There is something here greater than either Jonah or Solomon. You ought, then, to listen to him, to Jesus, to live by his wisdom, and to answer his call to repentance.

In Matthew, Jesus brings in the earlier part of Jonah’s adventures and points to his three days in the belly of the fish. This is the sign of Jonah, according to Matthew, a foreshadowing of the three days Jesus would spend lying dead in the tomb. Matthew’s account gives us the stronger imagery and we may be tempted to assume that Luke implies the same thing. There are few biblical images more powerful than that of Jonah in the belly of the great fish.

But there is no indication that the Ninevites knew anything about the fish! For Luke, the sign is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people. And this clears the way for us to notice something else in Jonah’s experience at Nineveh. Not only do the people repent, but God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them. God’s repentance displeased Jonah exceedingly, we are told, and he was angry.

When Jesus directed his listeners to the sign of Jonah it has to be that the divine mercy shown there is uppermost in his mind. He has come, after all, to show us the Father. The repentance of God in the Book of Jonah anticipates so many of the parables of Jesus in which the justice of God becomes puzzling because swallowed up in God’s mercy. If we feel a bit angry at the prodigal son, or the eleventh-hour labourers who are paid the same as those who worked all day, or at the thought of prostitutes and other public sinners entering the kingdom of heaven before us, then we are in the company of Jonah.

He felt used by God. His mission was a complete success, the whole city repented at his preaching, and still he was angry. This, then, is the sign of Jonah. In calling us to repentance, God is asking us to become like Him. He is always ready to be merciful, to turn towards us. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son, the first sign of repentance from the sinner wins God’s attention and mercy. (In fact we believe it would not even be possible without God’s prior attention and mercy.)

The freedom of heaven, of which Paul speaks in the first reading, is seen in God's freedom and extravagant generosity which so annoy Jonah. Grace is not confined and those who are called to be preachers of grace must never forget it. The servant of the Word is always at God's disposal, doing only his duty, preaching the call to repentance and the coming of the kingdom. There is no neat measure of the effectiveness of that preaching, no way of predicting what its results might be.

For freedom Christ has set you free, Paul says elsewhere in Galatians. As followers of Jesus we are messengers of that freedom, servants doing our duty, instruments in whatever way God judges best in alerting others to the freedom God has promised.

Week 28 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 25.6-10a; Psalm 22/23; Philippians 4.12-14,19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

The readings build a beautiful picture of God’s universal and extravagant love. What God wants is the salvation of all people. The celebration of this divine love is described by the prophet Isaiah as a wonderful banquet – the best of wine, the best of food, plenty for everybody. The responsorial psalm is along the same lines. The Lord is our shepherd who takes care of us especially when we find ourselves in dark places and who has prepared a banquet for us. Goodness and kindness will follow us all the days of our life and then, at the end, we shall dwell in the Lord’s house for ever and ever. The second reading, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, repeats the point: God will fulfil all your needs as lavishly as only God can.

Generous, extravagant, fulfilling all needs, unexpected and unsolicited gifts: so is the grace of God in his love for humanity.

But then an off note begins to sound, a fly in the ointment, a bitter drop to distract us from the sweet things we have been hearing up to now. Paul says that such confidence in God’s goodness enable him to cope with whatever circumstances life sends his way: poor or rich, poverty or plenty, he can do all things with the help of the One who strengthens him. It was good, he concludes, that you shared in my hardships. Why good? So as to appreciate the gift, it seems, to realise that even in the dark valleys the Lord is there, not just present with us but sharing those things with us and strengthening us to live through them.

The gospel parable brings even deeper darkness and bitterness. There are some who will refuse to come to the great feast which has been prepared, now described as the wedding banquet for a king’s son. They turn away, valuing other things ahead of that banquet. It even turns nasty with some of them harassing and killing the servants of the king. His retaliation is swift and brutal. The invitation is thrown open to anybody and everybody, bad and good alike, so that the wedding hall is filled with guests.

We could stop there and some think that the parable ends there. It would be puzzling enough. What has happened to the universal and extravagant love, to the power of God to take away all sadness and mourning, everything that might hinder access to anybody’s joyful participation in the banquet? It seems that people are free to refuse and what a tragedy that would be. Failing to appreciate the gift offered, disdaining the generosity of the one who invites you, even to the point of being violent towards those who renew the invitation – it seems as if the refusal must be conscious, deliberate, considered, free.

But we could also read on, listening to what is either the second part of the parable, or a second parable latched on to the first one. This is about a person invited to the wedding feast who is not wearing the appropriate dress and this is the strangest note of all in this passage. Are we all supposed to go around all the time dressed in our best clobber just in case somebody, out of the blue, invites us to a wedding? Imagine the cities and countryside of the world with everybody dressed every day for a wedding! It would be a wonderful sight, a kind of sartorial paradise, and would keep the fashion designers of Milan and Paris in business like never before.

So what is it about? It can seem as if what was unconditional up to then – the universal and extravagant love of God offered to all people – has suddenly become conditional. There is something we must be or do in order to maintain our place at the banquet. Rich and poor are invited, good and bad are invited, anybody and everybody is invited – so what is it they must become or must do in order to secure their place?

Perhaps it is simply a parable of readiness like others in the gospel. Be prepared. Be alert. Be watchful. You know not the day nor the hour. Don’t forget to have oil in your lamp, because the bridegroom is coming at an hour you do not expect.

And what does it mean to ‘have oil in your lamp’, to have on a ‘wedding garment’? Isaiah talks about the Lord removing garments from us – the veil of mourning, the shroud enwrapping all nations. The gospel now speaks of a garment we need to put on which must refer to what Saint Paul talks about when he tells us to ‘put on Christ’ (Romans 13:14; Galatians 3:27). To wear the right garment means to follow Christ – especially on the way of the cross, as Paul says elsewhere in Philippians – and so to recognize and appreciate the gift held out to us in the invitation we have received.

The man being cast out is not then an arbitrary punishment by a god once again become irascible. It is rather the truth of the man’s situation, that he has not disposed himself to appreciate the gift for what it is: a gift, freely, generously and extravagantly offered. So not to be presumed upon and not to be taken without gratitude to the giver.

That seems to be it. We are all invited to the banquet. We anticipate it in our celebration of the Eucharist. But we must make every effort to dispose ourselves correctly. It is only the courteous thing to do. But it also means learning how to appreciate love received so that we might become capable in our turn of loving in the same way: freely, generously, extravagantly. Loving one another as Jesus loved his disciples, and loving him, the Father’s invitation to us, so that we will be ready to be with him when the time comes, our hearts filled with gratitude and wonder.

We pray that the Lord will help us to dress ourselves in that way and so be ready. The invitation has already been sent and we have received it. In the Lord’s own house shall we dwell, when God has removed the garments that hinder our joy and enables us to put on the one garment that guarantees our eternal happiness, God’s only Son, Jesus Christ.

Week 27 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 3:22-29; Psalm 105; Luke 11:27-28

This is probably the shortest gospel reading in the Church's liturgical year. But it packs a punch. Like Elisabeth earlier in Luke's gospel this woman 'raises her voice'. She is a preacher but unlike Elizabeth her message misses the mark. Jesus corrects her: my mother is to be praised in the first place for her faith, for hearing the Word of God and for keeping it.

It is as if the woman is still caught on the level of the first creation. The fruitfulness of the womb and the nourishment of the breast, these are blessings of that first creation. Hearing the Word of God and keeping it, these are blessings of the new creation. The first creation blesses but confines us. (Paul says in the first reading for this day in year 2). It is the new creation that sets us free, the kingdom of faith and of the Spirit. New relationships are established in this kingdom and on a new basis: 'my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it', Jesus had explained earlier (Luke 8:21). It is not just about hearing the Word, and being able to parrot it back perhaps, it is about 'keeping' and 'doing' the Word (cf Luke 6:46-49).

Mary herself wondered about this transition from the first to the new creation. 'How can it be', she asks the angel of the annunciation. The first creation required only God's Word: 'let it be', and so it was. But the new, second, creation requires the words and believing hearts of human beings - Mary who says 'let it be done to me according to your word', Jesus who says 'my food is to do the will of my Father who sent me'. Such is the dignity bestowed on the creature by God, that we are made participants in the construction of the new creation, builders with Him of the kingdom that is coming.

Life remains difficult for us even when we believe and seek to do what the Word asks of us. This is because we belong to both creations. We belong to the Second, the Last, Adam who for freedom has set us free, but we still belong also to the First Adam. The 'old man' remains alive in us as long as we are pilgrims in this world and our work of being transformed is still underway. The 'new man' is already created and has come to birth in us. But we continue to struggle to convert our minds fully to what Christ has done for us, and to walk purely and simply in the way he has mapped out for us.

Week 27 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 3:7-14; Ps 111; Luke 11:15-26

His letter to the Galatians is one of the most personal of Paul's letters. In it he tells us about his own spiritual journey and about his argument with Peter at Antioch. The passage we read today can seem like a simple piece of rabbinic argument about the interpretation of the law but in it we get another glimpse of Paul's most personal struggle.

He quotes Deuteronomy 21:23, 'cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree'. This text helps to explain Saul's fury, and his conviction of righteousness, in persecuting and even killing Christians. In terms of what the Scriptures taught, what the Christians were proposing was blasphemous and obscene. They were claiming that the Lord, the God of Israel, had shown his power, and revealed his holiness, in an accursed thing, a hanged man.

Saul was moved to imitate Phinehas, praised in the psalms for his defence of God's righteousness (Psalm 106:28-31). A plague afflicted the people as a result of their worship of the Baal of Peor, into which they had been seduced by intermarrying with the Midianites. Phinehas killed a Hebrew man married to a Midianite woman (Numbers 25:1-9): this is the event hidden under the psalmist's innocuous 'Phinehas stood up and intervened'. Phinehas was celebrated as a defender of the holiness of the God of Israel and Saul's zeal was of the same quality: uncompromising, passionate, violent.

The cross of Christ, Paul tells us later, is folly for Gentiles and a stumbling block for Jews: this was Paul's personal difficulty also, an apparently insoluble one, an obstacle that he could not get over. He could not square this circle, that the Lord would reveal his power and holiness in a way that he had earlier declared to be accursed. It was only his encounter with the Risen Lord on the road to Damascus that convinced him of the truth of what the Christians were teaching: Christ has ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So the possibility of faith by which human beings share in the righteousness of God, the blessing of Abraham, is extended to the Gentiles through Jesus the Christ.

It was indeed true that God had shown his power and revealed his holiness not in the violence of his would-be defenders but in the death of His Son on the Cross. The obstacle that Paul could not get over then became the key to his whole understanding of God and of God's grace. Towards the end of Galatians he writes 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ' (6:14). And in writing to the Corinthians he returns to the obstacle that becomes the key, 'I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified' (1 Cor 2:2).

Our Lady of the Rosary - 7 October

Reading: Acts of the Apostles 1.12-14; Luke 1.46-55; Luke 1:26.38

A story goes around among us that one of our younger and more traditional brothers, in response to John Paul II’s decision to introduce five luminous mysteries of the Rosary, placed a notice in the church where he was assigned. In one column he listed the twenty mysteries of the Rosary ‘as recommended by John Paul II’, the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. In another column he listed the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary ‘as recommended by the Blessed Virgin Mary’, the traditional joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries without the modern addition of luminous mysteries.

Many preachers and teachers had probably worked out a rationale for the three sets of joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. From the joy of Galilee and the romantic preaching and healing ministry of Jesus, through the darkness of his passion and death in Jerusalem, to the glory of the resurrection and his return to Galilee, his return then to the Father from where he sends the Spirit to establish the Church and disseminate in the world the new and risen life of the Kingdom. It was a pleasing pattern, from joy to sorrow to glory.

Back to the drawing board then, to break open this pattern and include also five luminous mysteries. I suppose some people had already thought it strange that the traditional mysteries took us straight from the finding in the Temple, when Jesus was twelve years old, to the agony in the garden, on the eve of his death. Surely there were mysteries to be contemplated in the time between, in the public ministry of teaching and healing, of miracles and exorcisms.

Dominicans particularly, for whom today’s celebration of Our Lady of the Rosary is a major feast, should have been aware that Thomas Aquinas divided the mysteries of the life of Christ into four sets, the mysteries of his coming into the world, those of the progress of his life in this world, those of his departure from the world, and those of his exaltation after this life. Although not exact in every detail this general division corresponds with what we now know as the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the Rosary.

But ‘every action of Christ is for our instruction’ is a saying handed on in the tradition so that we could conceivably continue to gather sets of five mysteries. We could, for example, meditate on five great parables. Or on five remarkable healings. Or on five ways in which God is present to his people. Or on the actions of five characters in the passion of Christ. And so on.

The use of beads and repeated short prayers is found in most of the world’s religions and we could meditate on other sets of mysteries as we seek to enter more fully into the richness of Christ. What is absolutely sacred is the Lord whose life and light we receive through praying the Rosary.  It is a way of contemplating and it is a way of preaching. It is a way of contemplation and a compendium of Christian doctrine for everyone. We might be tempted to consider ourselves too sophisticated for something that is more at home in popular religious devotion. But it has made great contemplatives over the centuries, and it has made great saints.

We are in the company of Mary as we pray the Rosary, just as the apostles and disciples were in her company as the Church waited for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Mary participates in a unique way in the mysteries of her Son’s life, keeping all these things constantly in her heart as she shared personally in so many of them. She becomes a teacher of prayer for us, leading us into the mysteries of Christ, mysteries that are inexhaustible sources of life and light. She becomes a preacher of the Word for us, the one who first brought the good news of the gospel to another person when she visited her cousin Elisabeth. 

The Rosary is very near to us, as close as the fingers on our hands. It is a prayer that can be said anywhere. We can bring to it our own experiences of joy and learning, of sorrow and exaltation. And as we contemplate those mysteries of light in which we meditate on Jesus the teacher we place ourselves in the position of students and disciples, keen to learn what all these mysteries mean, keen to imitate what they contain and keen finally to obtain what they promise.

Week 27 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 79; Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21:33-43

As Flann O’Brien, or perhaps Father Ted, might put it, there was a time when Ireland was overrun with absentee landlords. Having been taught about the iniquities that invariably attend this form of ownership and management, one will be a bit troubled at the thought of God as an absentee landlord, as the traditional reading of this parable seems to require. Galilee at the time of Jesus had its share of absentee landlordism, rich Syrians and Egyptians who kept estates there, worked by tenants, the landlords sending their agents (their slaves as the parable puts it) to receive the profits at the appropriate time.

There are other things that puzzle about this parable. One is the fact that the traditional reading seems to fall a bit too easily into the conclusion that the Jews have blown it and it is time for the Christians to take over (‘it will be taken from you and given to another nation’). One recent commentator says that the interpretation of this text is now crucial in Jewish-Christian relations and one can see why.

A third puzzle to put alongside God as an absentee landlord, and the potential for anti-Semitism, is the strange change Jesus makes in response to the Jewish leaders' summary of what the parable means. They take it as a story about an unreliable leadership and regime being replaced by a more reliable leadership and regime, possibly thinking of themselves, and that the settlement between Romans, Herod and the Jewish religious leaders was a better thing than the corrupt kingship which had led to destruction and exile many centuries before.

It is amazing to us that they show no interest in who the son of the parable might be. For Christians hearing it, of course, his appearance is the climax of iniquity in the story and we know exactly who is intended and what imminent events – the death and resurrection of Jesus – are hinted at in this parable.

It is likely though, that the reference to the stone which appears from nowhere – not just the reference to it but the stone itself according to the Book of Daniel – that this is actually the key and the clue to the meaning of the parable.

The chief priests and the elders of the people show no interest in the son. They see the point of the story however: any absentee landlord worthy of the name will very quickly dispose of those wicked tenants and replace them. They say this themselves: ‘he will bring those wicked men to a wretched end and lease the vineyard to tenants who will come up with the goods’.

Then Jesus talks about the stone and it seems like a complete non sequitur. The Hebrew may be some help, for in Hebrew son is ‘ben’ and stone is ‘eben’. But the context is even more helpful. This is a parable told in Jerusalem and not just in Jerusalem but in the Temple. This is a parable told just after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple. Things are coming to a climax in the life of Jesus. The stakes are getting higher and he is being quite provocative, baiting the chief priests and the elders with what he is doing and with the justification he is giving for what he is doing.

The kingdom of God – Matthew rarely uses this expression – will be taken from you, Jesus says, and given to a people who will produce its fruit. The kingdom of God is the kingdom spoken of in the Book of Daniel, represented by a stone that comes from God knows where, to crush the earthly kingdoms and replace them with a kingdom that will never end (see Daniel 2). Jesus combines this with texts that refer to a rejected stone that becomes the keystone (see Isaiah 28:16; Job 38:6; Jeremiah 51:26; Psalm 118:22). Apparently the stone the prophets had in mind when they used this expression was not very far away from Jesus as he spoke, for it was the stone that formed the pinnacle of the Temple, a stone cast aside that found its way to the place of greatest honour.

And this perhaps helps us to see how radical and unsettling is the parable of Jesus and his challenge to the Jewish leaders at this moment. It is radical and unsettling and a challenge not just to them but also to us who listen and try to understand what is going on here. The people to whom the kingdom is to be given cannot be simply identified. It is not as simple as saying non-Jews will replace Jews. It is not as simple as saying that one group of Jewish leaders who became followers of Jesus will replace another group of Jewish leaders who refused to become followers of Jesus. That’s the story of the world’s empires and institutions from time immemorial.

But we believe that something radically new is established in what is happening to Jesus and what is happening through Jesus. The early Church quickly finds itself obliged to talk about a new birth (as Jesus had done) and even of a new creation. Jesus himself talked about a different basis of identity and relationship, a family established on the basis of faith in him. The point of the parable, with the strange conclusion about the rejected stone, is that it is not just a change of management that is envisaged, not just emptying the house and filling it with new tenants, but something much deeper. We are to think not just of a new earthly power replacing an old one but of a new kind of power which continually cuts across our established and traditional ways of seeing things, calling us ever on to new life.

Elsewhere in the New Testament we read about a vineyard in which the vines are pruned if they do not bear fruit and we hear Jesus saying things to his disciples about going out and bearing fruit, fruit that will last. That reference to the vine, in John 15, also reminds us of the identification Jesus makes between himself, the vine, and ourselves, the branches. The first reading of today’s Mass is a beautiful poem but perhaps misleads us when we come to think about the parable that echoes it. For it is the whole vine that is destroyed by God according to Isaiah not just the leadership at its head.

And the deepest mystery of these events unfolding in the last days of Jesus’ life is how he becomes Israel, he is Israel, taking on himself, although he is just and innocent, the punishment that Israel’s sins have deserved and ours too. The coming disruption of the community of Israel, played out historically in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple of which there are also echoes in this parable, is first played out in the body of Jesus, destroyed on the cross, but in three days rebuilt. The stone that is rejected has become the corner stone: this is one of the great resurrection texts of the early Church (see Romans 9:32; Ephesians 2:20; 1 Peter 2:4-7).

As an older but still valuable commentator, C.H.Dodds, puts it, ‘Jesus did regard his own ministry as the culmination of God’s dealings with His people … the guilt of all righteous blood from Abel to Zechariah would fall on that generation’. The climax of iniquity that is the killing of the Son becomes the setting up of the Stone, rejected by men but established by God. The winepress in the vineyard, says Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on this parable, is the altar of sacrifice. We continue to participate in these mysteries of sin and guilt, of redemption and love, as we offer the sacrifice of the Son and pray that through our sharing in it we will bear fruit that is of the kingdom of God.

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.