Week 12 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 16:1-12, 15-16; Psalm 106; Matthew 7:21-29

One summer many years ago I acted as chaplain for a week in a home for old people. It was about this time of the year and we were reading these sections of the Book of Genesis. Some of the older people were scandalised at what Abraham was getting up to in his old age and complained to me that 'we should not have to listen to this kind of carry on during Mass'.

It is indeed a bit shocking. Today's reading, for example, speaks about a kind of surrogate motherhood involving Sarai, Abram and Hagar. Sarai is keen to give her husband a child and does so using the womb of her servant Hagar. As soon as the maid is pregnant, however, she begins to feel superior to her mistress who is, for the moment, childless. Sarai's mood changes and she is not as keen on the situation as she was before it happened. Sarai wants to get rid of Ishmael and his mother, and Abram goes along with this. Ishmael is a wild ass of a man, not the son of the promise as Isaac was to be, but still not falling outside the reach of God's providence. Sarai and Abram might want to see the back of Hagar and Ishmael but God has a place for them in his plan - a plan he is working out through Abram - and it gives Ishmael some entitlement in the household of his father. What exactly the story of Hagar and Ishmael is trying to explain remains obscure, though they will figure later in Christian reflections on grace, freedom, and God's choice.

One of the issues raised here is that of legitimacy: how does a son become entitled to the inheritance of his father? Ishmael has a problem because he is the son of a servant. He is, it is true, the son of Abraham but not a fully legitimate one. He has, it seems, some rights in the household but not the full rights of a son born to a free woman. This is Paul's use of the story later, in Galatians, where Hagar represents the earthly Jerusalem, an unfree city, and Sarah represents the heavenly Jerusalem, the place of freedom God has established for all the children of Abraham.

The gospel reading blows apart all these older, more primitive, understandings of legitimacy and entitlement. The key to the door of the Father's kingdom is not now anything to do with the circumstances of one's natural birth. It is connected simply and exclusively with whether or not one acts on the will of the Father. It is not enough to hear it and to know it. The man building his house on rock is the one who not only hears the words spoken by Jesus but also acts on them. This is the new family of Abraham. He is our father in faith, and it is a faith in practice, a faith formed by the new commandment of love that characterises and unites the members of this family of Abraham.

In a text that anticipates Paul's hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, Jesus says that it is not enough to say 'Lord, Lord'. It is not enough to prophesy or to drive out demons. It is not enough to work mighty deeds. It is not enough to claim Abraham or Moses or David as our father. What is required is that a person hear the words of Jesus and act on them. It is at once simpler, and much more difficult, than any other way of belonging. We simply have to act on the teachings of Jesus which we have been listening to in the Sermon on the Mount. But if we are to act on those teachings in the way Jesus has asked, then we need the love of God to be poured into our hearts. It is the Holy Spirit, the bearer of that gift, who makes us to be the children of God, heirs with the Son, practitioners of the Law, people entitled to be in the household of the Father with an entitlement that is, purely and simply, His gift, renewed each day.

Week 12 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 104; Matthew 7:15-20

There is no doubt that God made a covenant with Abram who became Abraham. We are told over and over again in the Book of Genesis about the call of Abraham, the promise God made to him, and the various ways in which this covenant was confirmed: from God's side, the mysterious sacrifice described in today's first reading, and the gift of Isaac; from Abraham's side, the decision to leave his own country, his acceptance of circumcision as a sign of the covenant, and his agreement to an even more mysterious sacrifice, the sacrifice of Isaac, which at the last minute God intervenes to prevent. Woven within these strange, primeval, tales, handed down from many centuries before Christ, is the story of a relationship, a friendship, between God and Abraham. Through a series of encounters and adventures this friendship is established, sealed, and strengthened so that Abraham becomes one of the friends of God and our father in faith.

Discerning the spirits is a perennial question, especially for religious people. There are many masters and teachers, many founders of churches and purveyors of spiritual wisdom. Sometimes these people ask strange things of their disciples, a loyalty to the leader that does not respect human freedom, sometimes immoral behaviour, the acceptance of peculiar teachings, and people have even agreed to commit suicide at the behest of gurus and cult leaders.

Jesus warns us about false prophets and the need to be on the alert for them. What can make discernment difficult is that true religion also deals in mystery, as we see in the stories about Abraham, and to the skeptical its teachings can also seem 'weird and wonderful'. But true religion is deeply rational and not at all arbitrary. True religion asks for faith, yes, but never for faith in human teachers, always only for faith in God. It is not right to make to anybody except to God the total submission which faith is. God alone, says Thomas Aquinas, is the object of our faith. Where teachers ask immoral things, or the acceptance of doctrines that are clearly not compatible with the teaching of the Church, then we know that they are false teachers, misleading prophets. Sometimes it is easy to know what you are dealing with.

But at other times it is not so clear. The prophets themselves may be sincerely misled. They may be sincere in believing that they are carrying the message of God for people, and that they are winning people for God and not for themselves. The power of charismatic personalities is very dangerous, and sometimes it is not easy to see when it is being used for good and when it is distorting truth and goodness. The mix of eros and religious devotion is particularly potent, and there are many examples in Church history, even in very recent times, of how this mixture can distort truth and goodness. Often such figures are attractive because they are concerned with reform and renewal, they invite people to live lives that will be more perfect and more spiritual than those of the generality of Christians. But there are dangers lurking in such spiritual quests and the devil has a particular interest in them.

Jesus offers a criterion in today's gospel reading: 'by their fruits you shall know them'. This is a criterion given already in the Book of Deuteronomy: a prophet whose words are fulfilled is a true prophet, whereas a prophet whose words are not fulfilled is a false prophet (Deuteronomy 18:15-22). We must wait, then, to see what the fruits will be. We must wait to see what comes from the spiritual teaching and actions of the teacher. It does not mean that things will be simple and straightforward, as we see from the disciples' experience with Jesus. We set off, like Abraham, like the disciples, with faith in God and in God's guiding light of truth. If it leads us along strange ways and unexpected paths we must, more than ever, keep our eyes, our hearts, fixed on that light of truth. Hold on to the truth of which you are certain and you are then equipped to discern the fruits that come from doctrines, practices, and people. Keep alive and alert the keen edge of your appreciation of the truth: this is the purity of heart which enables you to see not just the truth there is in the things of this world but to see God, as Abraham did, within the things of this passing world.

Birthday of John the Baptist

Readings: Isaiah 49:1-6; Ps 139; Acts 13:22-26; Luke 1:57-66, 80

According to the gospel of Luke the annunciation to Mary took place ‘in the sixth month’ of the pregnancy of Elizabeth (Luke 1.26). So their two boys, John the Baptist and Jesus, are taken to have been born six months apart. We celebrate the birthday of Jesus on 25 December and so, by a certain kind of literal logic, we celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist on 24 June. (Why a day’s difference though?)

Of course we have no idea when either child was born. In the early Christian centuries the celebration of the birth of Christ came to replace the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year sees the sun turn around and begin its ascent northwards. The festival of ‘sol invictus’, the unconquered sun, was replaced in Christendom with the festival of the birth of ‘sol iustitiae’, the sun of justice, Christ the Lord.

It means also that the birthday of John the Baptist coincides, more or less, with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  Celebrations of Saint John’s Night owe something to the natural instinct to mark these turning points in the earth’s year. Older pagan celebrations were baptised by Christianity, taken over and given a new meaning. Already in the Bible the Jewish festivals are combined celebrations of the events of salvation history and the seasonal changes of the year, sowing and springtime and harvest.

Can we take something, then, from the fact that we celebrate John’s birth at midsummer? At a time when the light in the northern hemisphere is at its strongest and brightest we celebrate the birth of one who ‘was not himself the light but came as a witness to the light’ (John 1.8). Just as the intense light of dawn can be confused with that of sunset, it was not immediately clear whether John might not be the light promised by God. Some of his followers and some of the Jewish leaders wondered whether John might be the Messiah.

But he is clear that there is someone greater coming after him, one of his own followers, one baptised by him and that this one is ‘the true light who was coming into the world’ (John 1.9). John is a ‘herald’ who announces the arrival of someone more important than himself and he points out Jesus to his disciples, recognising him as ‘the lamb of God’ (John 1.36). We see John, in the gospels, making Jesus known, pointing him out and sending others to him.

Jesus in turn says that John the Baptist is the greatest of human beings. There is no prophet as great as he is. John is so totally given to his mission that he is called simply ‘a voice’, crying in the wilderness, calling God’s people to repent, return and prepare for the coming of the Lord. Like all the prophets John excites opposition and criticism. Eventually he will be executed at the command of Herod but before that the religious leaders had campaigned against him, accusing him of being possessed by demons (Matthew 11.18). As well as being the voice of prophetic consolation, this new Elijah is a ‘troubler of Israel’ as much as he is her comforter.

The light that shines from John the Baptist is the grace and holiness of God’s people of the old covenant. Among all those just men and women who looked forward to the deliverance of Israel, John stands at the head. He straddles two epochs in the history of God’s relationship with human beings because the preaching of the Christian gospel begins with the preaching of John the Baptist. When John appeared in the wilderness, what Saint Paul calls ‘the fullness of time’ (Galatians 4.4; Ephesians 1.10) had arrived.

From now on the days will shorten and the sun decline in the northern hemisphere. But it remains midsummer in God’s relationship with his people. Winter is over and summer has come. Sin and death have been conquered by the one to whom John points. Christ our Saviour is always with us, shining even in the darkness. This is midsummer indeed, to see ‘the light of the glory of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4.5). The finger of John the Baptist points always to Him who is the Light that the darkness can never overcome (John 1.5).

Week 12 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33(32); Matthew 7:1-5

'History' begins in the Bible with today's first reading. Abram, later Abraham, is called by 'the Lord' to leave his own place and family and go to a new land which this (new?) God will point out to him. In return for his docility, Abram is to become the father of a great nation but his election is one through which all the nations of the earth will be blessed. So from the very beginning God's chosen people carry a mission for all humanity. We call Abram 'our father in faith' and this first obedience he shows, in responding to God's call, is just one of a series of acts of trust and obedience in which he reveals his unshakeable faith in the Lord.

The new land is Canaan in which there are already - surprise, surprise! - Canaanites. Humanity continues to be riven by divisions and conflicts, and almost any point of difference between two groups of people becomes a reason for stoking division - language, ethnicity, age, gender, not to mention more controversial differences such as political inclinations, sexual orientations, religious affiliations.

We will find specks in our brother's eye to justify our thoughts and actions against him while remaining blind to the planks of prejudice in our own eye. The salvation we need is to have our blindness healed so that we might see more clearly, more truthfully. The salvation we need is to have our deafness healed so that we might hear more clearly, more truthfully.

That would make it possible for us to see and hear the presence and voice of the Lord calling us, for we too belong to those 'all the nations' who are to be blessed. But just as we cannot love God whom we do not see or hear if we do not love our neighbour whom we do see and hear, so we keep our ears and eyes open for the presence and the voice of God in the face and voice of our neighbour.

We are not told how Abram heard the voice of God calling him but presumably it was in the circumstances and relationships of his daily life, interpreted in faith. So for ourselves - let us remove what blocks our hearing and confuses our seeing so that we might see and hear the Lord present and calling us to position ourselves in a new way - and doing it in the one who is alongside us, through the face and voice of our neighbour.

The Body and Blood of Christ (Year C)

Readings: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 109/110; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

There is a perfectly good feast of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday so why do we need this one as well? One way of understanding it is to say that these great feasts that come after Pentecost - Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christ, the Sacred Heart - are moments to reflect again, and to celebrate anew, the riches of the Paschal Mystery. We have already seen and celebrated them in Holy Week and throughout the Easter season but their meaning is never exhausted.

Another response is to say that this particular feast, Corpus Christi, invites us to focus on the sacrament of the Eucharist, the fact that Our Lord has chosen to be with us and to feed us in this extraordinary way. The Welsh poet David Jones came up with a happy phrase to describe this further level of the Son's self-emptying: 'he placed himself in the order of signs'. So the feast is marked by adoration of the Sign, the Blessed Sacrament, and by processions in which the Sacrament is carried through the streets and the people are blessed with it.

A sacrament is a sign or a symbol, obviously. It is something visible to anybody who can see. But the communication it makes and the communion it establishes are not visible and accessible to everybody. As Thomas Aquinas says, 'here the senses fail and only hearing is to be trusted'. In other words what the Church has received and handed on about this sacrament can be trusted, and gives access to its meaning. In today's second reading Paul tells us that this process has been underway from the beginning: 'I am passing on to you what I have myself received from the Lord'. To trust this tradition - 'tradition' refers to the process of receiving and handing on - is to believe what the community of disciples has believed, from the beginning, about the Blessed Sacrament.

What is communicated to us is the presence of Christ, the Risen Lord, with His people in this sacramental way. Like the disciples at Emmaus, we recognise Him in the breaking of the bread. His presence as the Risen Lord means, of course, His presence as the One who was crucified. The breaking of the bread speaks to us of the breaking of His body on the cross, the gift of Himself which He made to the Father and to the world in that moment of sacrificial love and obedience. What does the Eucharist say to us? It speaks to us of presence, of sacrifice, of the self-giving which we see in Jesus and to which He calls his disciples.

Because it is a sign in the form of a meal it is about communion, life shared. The original feeding we experience is at our mother's breast and the Eucharist speaks first of this: it is a kind of suckling. As we eat the bread and drink the cup, the Divine Pelican (another image used by Thomas Aquinas) feeds us with His own body and blood. Because it is a sacrament, a special kind of sign or symbol, and because it is the Sacrament, we believe that it is not just an indicator of such feeding but, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is really such a feeding. We do eat His Body and drink His Blood, and in eating and drinking we take into ourselves the whole of Christ. He enables us to offer a sacrifice acceptable to the Father - the unique sacrifice that is His alone - and to have a heavenly food to nourish our souls.

The Eucharist is a means to an end and is also at the same time the End. The purpose of the Eucharist is the unity of the Church. We eat the Body and Blood of Christ so that by doing so the same Holy Spirit who transforms the bread and wine will transform us to be one body and one spirit in Christ. But the Eucharist is also the End. It contains Christ and what more is there? Here we are already in His presence and what more is to be hoped for? It is described as heavenly food, 'a pledge of future glory', a participation already in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

Bread and wine, the most common food, fruits of the earth and work of human hands, become, by the power of the Spirit and the words of the Church, the bread of life and our spiritual drink. Let us seek today to appreciate again the wonder of this gift, the Real Presence of Christ in our churches, the creative and ever-generous genius of God.

Week 11 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: 2 Corinthians 11:18,21-30; Psalm ; Matthew 6:19-23

In some translations Paul says to the Corinthians that he did not come to them with any 'show of oratory', any 'lofty eloquence' (1 Cor 2:1). But the passage we read today, along with others in 2 Corinthians, show us that at least in writing Paul has rhetorical and oratorical skills second to none in the ancient world. He puts them at the service of a form of literature common in many cultures, whereby the heroic deeds of an important person are sung, building in a crescendo to some dramatic climax, some remarkable achievement or action which crowns the person's heroism. Bards in Ireland did this for their chieftains, praise-singers in Africa do the same.

So Paul is singing his own praises, he is boasting, as he says himself. Ironically, though, his litanies record, not any achievement or greatness of his own, but the disasters that have come on him, his deepening knowledge of his own fragility and a list of things undergone, 'suffered'. The litany we read today is cut off before it reaches its climax in the most humiliating of his experiences, when he fled Damascus by being lowered in a basket from a window in the city wall (2 Cor 11:32-33). 

It is all in order to exalt the grace of God which is 'made perfect in weakness ... for when I am weak, then I am strong' - this is how he concludes the next such litany, the one we find in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 and which we will read at Mass tomorrow.

Paul is living fully in the light of which Jesus speaks in today's gospel reading. It is the light of truth, which shows Paul, as it showed Catherine of Siena and all the great mystics of the Church, that God is the One who is and she (or he) is the one who is not.

It may seem like bad news at first, to be reminded of our weakness, fragility and nothingness. But this is the light that fills the whole body, for then we see that everything we have and are, everything we do and undergo, is received and lived by God's grace. All is gift, not only what is easily seen to be so but all that comes our way, because it comes from the same hands, from the Lord, in whom we live and move and have our being. We can add: in whom we suffer and fail and lose our way, for we can never fall outside the care of those merciful hands.

So let us boast of what we have come to see. If we dare! For we cannot praise God's amazing grace without revealing also the weakness of the poor man, the poor woman, who sings its praises.

Week 11 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings: 2 Corinthians 11:1-11; Psalm 111; Matthew 6:7-15

Preaching and theology can become babbling just as prayer can, even more so. What saves any of them from that fate? Heaping up words is a temptation in many situations, thinking that more words means more sense, which of course does not automatically follow. Sometimes it is better to be silent, whether in prayer, in preaching or in theology. As in music or poetry the silences between are as important as the words or notes that are sounded.

Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians feels impelled to break his silence, even if - it seems to be one of their criticisms of him - he is not impressive as an orator. (He is as a writer: even the Corinthians acknowledge this, but they find his physical presence disappointing.) But the truth demands that he speak and so does his passion for them. He is jealous for them with the jealousy of God, he says. He is in love with them, in other words, and so cannot stay silent if he sees them wandering into ways that are false and that lead them away from their true good.

The babbling we might do in prayer is the least dangerous of all babblings, because prayer is more about the desire - the passion, the being in love, the jealousy - than it is about any words we might manage to put together in trying to articulate our desires. The liturgical prayers of the Church help us. They are works of restrained passion, we can say, of disciplined jealousy, expressions tried and tested across the centuries that achieve some right balance of thought and feeling, of words and desires.

The Our Father is the pattern for all prayers, whether liturgical or personal. It is short, concise, focused, profound. These 'words of the Word of God' are really too few to be babbled, though we may be distracted even in praying so short and venerable a prayer as it is. The important thing is the desire, love, passion, jealousy which turns us towards this prayer. When other words fail or become empty, and we tire of preaching and theology, these words remain.

They are words to which we will always return. How often one hears of old people, or persecuted Christians, who fall back on these words when all else is being taken away from them. They are words we are entitled to use - perhaps we can forget this: that we have a right to say these words. Having received the gift of the Holy Spirit, we can call God our Father. Having been baptised into Christ, we can speak with the Heavenly Father with confidence and freedom, as sons and daughters.