Tuesday 19 March 2024

Saint Joseph

Readings: 2 Samuel 7:4-5a, 12-14a, 16; Psalm 89; Romans 4:13, 16-18, 22; Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24a / Luke 2:41-51a

Joseph was a just or righteous man.This is high praise in the Bible and places him among the greatest of the patriarchs, prophets and kings. It puts him in the first place in the company of Abraham, whose faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. Abraham's faith was to hope against hope. He trusted in God as the One who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist. Supernatural revelations led Abraham to leave all that was familiar and to journey beyond the boundaries of his homeland. Supernatural revelations led Joseph to marry Mary and to care for her son as his own, sharing with them the perilous experiences of the first years of Jesus' life.

The promise to Abraham, transmitted not by physical descent as much as by spiritual affinity, is given to those who believe that with God all things are possible, with God nothing is impossible. Joseph, clearly, belongs with those who believe in this way.

Joseph is great precisely as a man, not just as a human being. His role in the history of our salvation is to be the husband of Mary and the father of Jesus, things only a man can do. He is the protector of his wife and child, charged by the Eternal Father with the task of keeping them safe and providing for them a home in which they might flourish. In that home Mary has the serenity in which to ponder in her heart all that is being revealed about the Child. She has the security of Joseph's respect for her chastity, the unique way in which she was the Bride of the Spirit and the Mother of God. In that home established by Joseph, Jesus has a safe place in which to grow in wisdom and in strength. Who knows what reflection of the Eternal Father he saw in the features and in the character of Joseph.

We can say then that Joseph was great for doing well the ordinary things men are called to do, and for doing these things for the two human creatures whom God loves above all others. Umberto Eco finishes one of his novels with the hero of the story deciding that the meaning of life is to be found in 'loving a woman and having a child'. Joseph lives this vocation to the full, and lives it in the most extraordinary circumstances. With Chesterton, and developing earlier traditions about his role, we can speak of Joseph as the greatest of Knights, the perfect fulfillment of the medieval ideals of chivalry. Those ideals included respect for women, care for the weak, strength in protecting the vulnerable, courage in fighting for what is just.

As Mary is entrusted to the disciples to be their Mother, the Church has come to regard Joseph as protector and provider not just for the family at Nazareth but for the whole Church. As well as praying to him for the grace of a happy death - this good man who died, tradition reasonably believes, in the company of Mary and of Jesus - we are encouraged to pray to him for all our material needs, for the wellbeing of our households, and for the happiness of our families.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph together make up a very unusual family. On one side this Holy Family is an earthly reflection of the Eternal Family of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. On the other side it is the perfect human family, the first domestic Church, a nuclear family whose life is established simply on faith, and hope, and love. Joseph is often forgotten as the Mother and Child take centre stage. Pictures representing Joseph holding the Child are rare and all the more wonderful for that. Often he is to one side, or in the shadow, sometimes an elderly paternal figure compared with Mary, sometimes (more likely) a strong man in his prime, charged with an exceptional mission.

The scriptures and the Christian tradition have some few things to say about Saint Joseph, the just man, wise and faithful, who was put in charge of God's household. What has been handed on to us is enough to give us a clear sense of a very good man who loved his woman and cared for his child. The fact that the woman is the ever-virgin Mary and the child is the world's Redeemer transforms this ordinary goodness into an extraordinary holiness.

Monday 18 March 2024

Lent Week 5 Monday

Readings: Daniel 13:1-9, 15-17, 19-30, 33-62; Psalm 23; John 8:12-20

It is a fair attempt at ensuring due process and a fair trial, to insist, as the law of Moses did, on the testimony of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15-21). It was an effort an ensuring that there could not be miscarriages of justice. Of course conspiracies to frame people and have them unjustly tried were always possible as long as people were prepared to get together to bear false witness. It was one of the major commandments of the law, and is one of the essential structures of any just society, that people not bear false witness but speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

We know from experience that no system of justice is perfect and that no combination of human beings involved in administering a system of justice will do so perfectly. It is one of the strongest arguments against capital punishment: no matter how good the system of justice might be, it is always administered by human beings and therefore liable to distortion and corruption. In the case of capital punishment there is no going back.

In the final days of Lent we are presented with figures who are unjustly treated even when the system of justice is being followed correctly. Susanna is one such figure and we hear about her in today's long but dramatic first reading. From the early days of the Church she has been a 'type of Christ', foreshadowing in her experience what was to happen to Jesus later on. It requires divine intervention, working through Daniel, to illuminate the truth of the situation. Here the testimony of two corrupt witnesses will be enough to condemn Susanna unless the Lord intervenes to ensure that a higher justice - the justice of truth rather than simply that of evidence - triumphs in her case.

In the final days of Jesus' life there is much focus on the justice of the trial he received. It was easy for the authorities who wanted to destroy him to find someone in his circle to betray him and it was easy for them to find others to testify against him. When false witnesses arise and speak against him they report his words but fail to see the true meaning of those words. 'He said he would destroy the Temple and raise it in three days'. 'He is telling us not to pay tribute to Caesar and that he himself is a king.' They are confused, Mark's gospel tells us, and understandably so since Jesus is trying to lead people beyond their normal categories of thought, expectation and understanding.

Who are to be the witnesses that will vindicate Him? In the passages from John's gospel which we read these days there is much about this question. We see the kind of non-judgmental judge Jesus is - his treatment of the woman taken in adultery is simply the most powerful moment in that revelation. But what of Jesus himself? Who will bear witness to Him? Who can vindicate the justice of His cause? Who will confirm the truth of His teaching?

It can only be the Father, says Jesus, He is the one who vindicates me, who bears witness to me, who confirms the truth of what I am saying. The Father knows where I come from and where I am going, Jesus says, because it is He who sent me. So the requirement of the Law, that there be the testimony of two witnesses, is fulfilled: the Father and Jesus can bear witness to who he is, to his origin and to his mission. But we might well sympathise with the confusion of the witnesses, even with disciples struggling to understand, if the logic of Jesus's argument in today's gospel reading is not immediately clear.

We need more light if we are to have any hope of understanding what Jesus is saying here. We believe that light has been given in the events we celebrate in the coming days. For the moment at least this much is clear: Jesus moves forward on the strength of his relationship with the Father. If everything else falls away, as eventually everything else will fall away, this will stand. He is sure of the Father's presence and certain too that, when the hour comes, the Father will bear witness to the Son in ways that only the creating power of God can as yet imagine.

Sunday 17 March 2024

Lent Week 5 Sunday B

Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Ps 50/51; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33


This passage takes us back to the very beginning of John’s Gospel. Philip is there and Andrew. There is the desire to see Jesus. There is a reference to the hour which has now come, there is a reference to Jesus being lifted up, and there is a reference to glory. All of these things we find in the opening pages of John’s gospel.

‘Lifted up’ is a theme that recurs in the gospel. When Philip brings Nathanael to meet Jesus at the beginning, Jesus says to him that he will see even more wonderful things, he will see the Son of Man, heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.  In chapter 3 Jesus told Nicodemus that the Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. And here now in chapter 12, Jesus says that he is to be lifted up, and will draw all to himself indicating now by this reference the way in which he was to die.

The hour had not yet come when Mary asked Jesus to work a sign at the marriage feast of Cana, at the beginning of Chapter 2 of John’s gospel. We are told twice again, in chapter 7 and in chapter 8, that the hour had not yet come. But now with the request of these Greeks to see Jesus, suddenly this seems to be the catalyst. The hour has come, Jesus says, for the Son of Man to be glorified, an hour which it is difficult to embrace but which he must embrace because this is the reason why he has come into the world, to come to this hour.

This is the hour of his glory but it is also the hour of the glory of the Father. These can never be separated, the glory of the Son and the glory of the Father.  The Father’s name is to be glorified as the Son of Man is glorified. ‘I have glorified it and I will glorify it again’, the voice says from heaven. Already he has glorified his name. When? In the old testament, in all that God had done in preparing his people for this hour. And again in the new testament, in what has been done through Jesus. Or perhaps it refers to all that Jesus has already done, the signs which he has already worked, through which the Father’s name has been glorified. And the great sign which is yet to come, the sign of his death, the climax of this revelation of the glory of God.

We are then given a rich, concentrated summary of the teaching of Jesus. ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.’ ‘Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world keep it for eternal life.’ ‘Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am my servant will be also and the Father will honour.’

The seed about which he had spoken in the parables, which sown in the earth bears fruit, the word of teaching, the word of wisdom, is now to become him, he himself, Jesus, sown in the earth, to become the fruit-bearing one, the bread of life which is his teaching is to be complemented, to be supplemented, by the living bread which he is to become, the word sown in the earth, the word who is to bring life, eternal life to the world.

This rich concentrated summary continues because it seems as if here in this short passage we find echoes of the baptism of Jesus, of the transfiguration of Jesus, of the agony in the garden, none of which is recounted in any detail by John and yet all of them here in this one short moment, the heart of these moments in the life of Jesus is here, where he is revealed as the servant, the chosen one, the beloved, the only son from the Father, the one who is to give life from the Father.

The one who saves his life loses it, the one who loses his life in service and in love keeps it for the eternal life. This teaching is given flesh in the way followed by Jesus, our saviour and our champion. He is the one who loses his life in service and in love, he is the one who keeps that life for eternal life, the one who becomes the source for us of eternal life.

So in this moment, this turning point in the gospel, we are given a glimpse beforehand of our champion ‘lifted up’, the warrior God come to engage the powers of evil and of death. And the hour of that engagement has arrived. The one in whose dying the world is judged. The one in whose dying the ruler of this world is driven out. The one in whose dying God’s glory is revealed. The one whose dying bears much fruit drawing all, men and women, to himself and so to the Father.

You can listen to this homily being preached here

Saturday 16 March 2024

Lent Week 4 Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 7; John 7:40-53


We are well into the second part of Lent. We have left far behind our concern with ourselves and with our efforts at repentance. The concern now is Jesus and the growing opposition to him. The first readings tell us of innocent people unjustly persecuted – Joseph, Jeremiah, Susanna, the just man of Wisdom 2 – while the readings from Saint John's gospel show how the pressure is mounting on the leaders of the people as the questioning about the identity of Jesus grows more intense.

Today’s gospel reading ends strangely: ‘then each went to his own house’. It seems like an insignificant detail, as if it were to say ‘then they went home for their supper’. There is a contrast between the ordinariness of this return home and the significance of what they had been talking and arguing about.

One of the main questions for now is this: ‘where is Jesus’ home?’ Some prophecies said he would come from Bethlehem while others seemed to indicate that he would be a Nazarene. The gospels give reasons for believing that he comes from each of those places, Bethlehem the home in which he was born, Nazareth the home in which he grew up.

But there is a growing contrast between these ordinary senses of ‘home’ – the comfort of knowing where people come from gives us the comfort of knowing something of their identity – and a sense that the true origins of Jesus are mysterious. They are mysterious not just in the sense that historical scholarship will fail to prove things one way or the other. They are mysterious in a much more profound and transcendent sense. The true home of Jesus is the one he shares with the Eternal Father. The true origin of Jesus is his being sent from the Father. When St John says that ‘each went to his own house’ it means in the case of Jesus that he went to the Father. For the moment he does this in prayer and prayer permeates his life: he is always in the presence of his Father. As the story unfolds he will return home to the Father in the mystery of his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus is more and more a stranger whom the people and their leaders try to pin down, to find out whether or not he is the messiah, whether he is the prophet who was to come. Jesus simply gets on with his work, which is to open the doors of his home to all who will become his disciples. We are being prepared for further instruction about the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the hearts of believers. If we keep his commandments and live according to his way of love, then God will dwell in us and with us. God will share His home with us, so that where the Son is, when he goes home at the end of His day, we will be there also to share the glory that was His before the world was made.

Friday 15 March 2024

Lent Week 4 Friday

 Readings: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22; Psalm 34; John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

From her work with very young children, Melanie Klein concluded that envy is a basic and perennial aspect of human experience. In her account of things, envy becomes the ‘original sin’ of humanity, a negative reaction to the source of good when it is being good towards me. It is a kind of resentment that the source of good is so good. The generosity of ‘the good breast’ is experienced as a kind of power over me which obliges me to be grateful and causes me to feel humiliated.

The first reading of today’s Mass is a powerful description of the effects of envy. The good person, simply by being good, is experienced as passing some kind of judgement on my way of living. Klein spoke of envy driving people into what she called the paranoid-schizoid position and we see these things described also in the first reading. The other person’s holiness is experienced as a threat to me even when that holiness places itself at my service. ‘Even to see him is a hardship for us’. We can presume that the just one is not making the judgements that the wicked attribute to him but their paranoia projects these judgements on to him. ‘In their thoughts they erred’: the deadly sins originate always in fantasies, thoughts that we find rising up within us without our having put them there. Of all these deadly thoughts, envy is one of the most insidious.

Envy hates to see others happy, or good, or holy. It experiences the happiness, goodness and holiness of others as some kind of deprivation. Thomas Aquinas describes it as a kind of sadness which results from feeling that God’s gifts to another person somehow take away from my worth and excellence. In this it is, of course, a kind of madness, but then all the deadly sins are forms of madness. Envy prevents me admiring and respecting others. I will feel obliged to pull them down in some way, to attribute wicked motives to them, to undermine the reputation they have for goodness.

Envy cannot bear to be grateful which is why it resents the source of good not only when it is being good to others but even when it is being good to myself. To be grateful is to acknowledge dependence and this is something envy cannot bear, it feels like a loss of self. At its worst envy becomes violent and physically destructive. The sense of humiliation and resentment that accompanies it makes it feel justified in trying to destroy the good one whom it feels has brought about this terrible feeling of denigration, dependence and even annihilation in itself. So Jesus becomes the victim of envy, the motivations of his eventual destruction at the hands of men following exactly this analysis of envy and what it leads to.

To ‘begrudge a brother his grace’ is one way of describing what arises from envy. Not only does the envious person feel that God's gifts to others are a threat to him, he also envies the Holy Spirit who is the source of grace. We see clearly the kind of madness it is, not only to resent God’s gifts to others as if this were some kind of slight in my regard, but to envy the generosity of the Spirit, the abundant kindness of God’s good breast.

Envy would prefer that all should be equally unhappy and is the most debilitating of sins. It seeks to pull everybody down to the same level of misery. After it has done its worst to others it becomes self-consuming and self-destructive. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says that envy is the worst sin – all other sins are only against one virtue whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.

For Thomas Aquinas the cure for envy is charity. We see how powerful a vice envy is: only the most powerful of the virtues can dissolve its power. Loving others enables us to enjoy, rather than envy, their achievements and blessings. The gifts of God to those I love I will experience as gifts in which I share. It is essential that we understand the roots of envy in us, that we understand its madness, and that we grow in the virtue of charity, which alone conquers the violence and destruction wrought by envy.

The kindergarten is a place full of sweet and innocent children. It is also a place where envy first raises its ugly head and begins to distort and destroy any possibility of communion and friendship. Our hope depends on the One who, destroyed by our envy, is raised to a new life. This new life means even more abundant kindness and blessing for the world, along with the capacity to rejoice in, rather than to resent, the love that is beyond all envy.

Thursday 14 March 2024

Lent Week 4 Thursday

Readings: Exodus 32:7-14 ; Psalm 106; John 5:31-47


It is strange how the conversation between Moses and God in Exodus 32 parallels the conversation between the prodigal father and the elder brother in Luke 15. In the parable, which we have heard a few times recently, the elder brother disowns the prodigal son, referring to him when speaking to his father as ‘your son’. The father reminds his elder son that the prodigal is not just his (the father’s) son but is his (the elder brother’s) brother: ‘this, your brother, was lost and is found, he was dead and is returned to life’.


In today’s first reading it is God who seeks to disown the prodigal people, saying to Moses ‘go down at once to your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved’. Moses then takes the place of the prodigal father saying back to God, ‘why should your wrath blaze up against your own people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?’ Jesus in the gospel reading sends his listeners back to this point also: if they will not believe what Moses wrote then they will not listen to what Jesus is saying.


The most fascinating thing about this combination of readings is that it seems to be the Lord, the God of Israel, who was the first to listen to Moses and to believe in him! Moses called God back to Himself, as the prodigal son needs to come to himself. Moses reminds God of who He is, as the prodigal son needed to remember who he was. You are the One, says Moses, who brought your people out with mighty hand and marvelous works. They are not my people, thank you very much, they are your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt. What are the nations to say now about your purpose in doing this? Was it with an evil intention, to deceive and mislead this people and only, in the end, to destroy them?


And if that does not work, Moses makes a deeper, more ancient appeal. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he says to God, and your promises to them. You are the God of our fathers, not just the God of this recent wonder at the Red Sea, these recent marvels in Egypt. You are the God who has been involved with your people from way back, fashioning a people for yourself from ancient times. You swore to these promises by your own self: are you to be true to yourself, to who you are, the God of our fathers, now revealed as the Lord, the God of Israel?


It is stirring stuff, these dramas of betrayal and reconciliation, of forgetfulness and remembrance.  And we are approaching the final act of the definitive drama. Now, says Jesus, there are many witnesses to me. There is John the Baptist and there are the works I have been doing. There is the testimony of the Father speaking through these but to accept this you must believe in the Son whom the Father has sent. There is the scripture, the Word of God, written down by Moses but also remaining in the hearts of believers. With all these witnesses, a great cloud on every side we might say, why is it that you still do not believe?


Because you are stiff-necked, we hear God saying to Moses in the first reading. And Moses’ response is not to deny the people’s sinfulness and forgetfulness, just as the prodigal father does not deny the prodigal’s mistakes. Moses’ response is to remind God of who they are and who God is – they are your people whom you called long ago, and you are the God who swore by your own self that you would be their God and they your people.


Like an old married couple who have fought long and hard God and the people are inextricably bound to each other, they have grown into each other. This is not to minimize the consequences of their sins, which are great. It is to exalt the way in which God will now once again swear by His own self that He is committed to this covenant: He will seal it now in the blood of the Son, a new and eternal covenant which is yet as old as Abraham.


So God relents and repents of what he intended to do. Once again He visits His people and once again He faces into their sins and forgetfulness, to remind them and to restore them to His family: He forever their God, they forever His people.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Lent Week 4 Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 49:8-15; Psalm 144; John 5:17-30

Christ is our judge, appointed to this office by the Father who has seated him at his right hand. What do we hear in the sentence 'Christ is our judge'? It may be that the word 'judge' stands out, making us fearful. Contemporary culture encourages the non-judgemental which strengthens what seems like a natural anxiety about our lives, our work, or our actions being judged.

It is, however, part of the wonderful good news that Christ is our judge. The word in the sentence that stood out for the first Christian believers was the word 'Christ' and not the word 'judge'. What a blessed relief it is, and what a gift, that the judge of our lives, our work, and our actions, is Jesus Christ. Nobody else, in the end. Of course we are all the time judging others and being judged by them. But the import of this gospel is that in the end, fundamentally, and most radically, we are judged by Christ, and by him alone.

There is even more, since for those who believe in him there will be a judgement without judgement - 'without being brought to judgement they pass from death to life' (John 5:24). Those who believe in him know the truth and there is no need for a further moment in which the relationship between their lives and the truth needs to be pointed out. In seeing the truth, those who believe see the distance between themselves and truth. They see their lives, their work, and their actions, in the light of truth, at once perfectly just and infinitely compassionate - and so they are judged without being judged.

Two great representations of the Last Judgement illustrate the point. The best known Last Judgement scene is that of Michelangelo, in the Sistine Chapel. A huge, brooding Christ comes to separate sheep and goats, just and unjust, and his presence is formidable and terrifying. The fact that this has become the best known Last Judgement scene serves to confirm that we know more about fear than we do about love.

A less well-known Last Judgement, whose theology is much sounder than Michelangelo's, is that of Fra Angelico in the priory of San Marco in Florence. There is the same separation of sheep and goats, of just and unjust, but Christ is not terrifying. He is gentle, and beautiful, and all he does is show his wounds. Those who believe in him do not need any further evaluation or criterion for assessing their lives, work, and actions. They are judged by the truth of his loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection and in the light of that truth can judge themselves: they see what is the case.

The saintly person knows that he falls seven times a day. Those of us whose consciences have become less sharp are not equipped to see the true state of our lives, work, and actions. Then judgement is needed, we need help, that things be pointed out and made clear for us. Jesus says further on in Saint John's gospel, 'the word that I have spoken will be (your) judge on the last day', the Word from the Father that is truth (John 12:48; 17:17).