Week 26 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Numbers 11:25-29; Psalm 19; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

Homily given at the Annual Conference of the Eckhart Society on 30 September 2012

I wonder which phrase in the readings would be picked out by Eckhart. Perhaps he would invite us to think about all those people in heaven without feet, hands and eyes. Or focus on that strange phrase in the first reading which tells us that the men on whom the Spirit came prophesied 'but not again'.

It is comforting to know that Joshua, who had been with Moses since his youth, and John, a young disciple with whom Jesus had a special relationship (as we are told elsewhere), that these two who ought to have known failed to understand. Joshua wants Moses to prevent Eldad and Medad prophesying because they had not fulfilled all the requirements. John wants Jesus to stop somebody casting out demons because he was 'not one of us'. And so we think we know where the boundaries are within which the Spirit will be working, or more likely that we know where the boundaries are within which the Spirit will NOT be working. Moses and Jesus seek to lead their eager followers into a deeper understanding.

It is comforting that such close disciples could still fail to understand but it is also a warning to anybody interested in gaining knowledge of God, or understanding God's presence and action. What we have seen already, what we have touched and experienced, the places to which our feet have already taken us: all this we must be prepared to cut off and throw away, the eye that has seen, the hand that has touched, and the foot that has walked. It is knowledge, experience and understanding but it becomes a kind of riches for us, to be relied on, settled into, and trusted.

James warns us in the second reading that riches corrode and distort. What begins as a help becomes an obstacle. It applies to material wealth: James and Luke are the two New Testament writers who warn us most consistently about the danger of wealth, without any 'spiritual' qualification. And we can apply it to any kind of possession, power, or comfort. St Thomas says that the beatitude of weeping applies particularly to those whose business is knowledge and understanding, to teachers and students, searchers and researchers, academics and intellectuals. Why must they particularly be ready to weep? Because if they are to enter more fully into the truth they must let go of ideas, understandings, theories, to which they have become attached, sometimes very strongly attached. It can be very difficult to let go of things that have become so dear to us, on which careers have been built, with which we have come even to identify ourselves, but obedience to the truth requires it, if we are to go on learning, if we are to grow in knowledge and understanding.

Such readiness to weep is also essential if we are to protect the 'little one' who is seeking to believe. What we have seen, experienced and come to understand, can become obstacles to the freedom of that little one. The little one is, perhaps, another (deepest?) level or aspect of ourselves, that can be blocked in, drowned out, overwhelmed by the self-assurance and confidence of eye and hand and foot. We throw the word 'infinite' around without, it seems, stopping to think about what we are claiming. And then go on talking as if we have 'finitised' the inifinite. The little one is the self that believes, remaining open to wonder and newness as she wanders (if she is not held back) through the landscape of revelation.

Aquinas quotes frequently a saying that came down from the Fathers of the Church to the effect that 'any truth, no matter by whom it is spoken, is from the Holy Spirit'. We can say also, in light of today's gospel, that any cup of water given to a person because they belong to Christ, earns an infinite reward. It is not a cup of water given according to the right conditions, or a cup of water given by someone who is 'one of us': any cup of water, given to anybody because they belong to Christ (that is belong to truth), earns a reward that is infinite.

Week 26 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Zechariah 8:20-23; Psalm 87; Luke 9:51-56

The city of Jerusalem is the geographical centre of salvation history. A place of endless sorrow and unmeasured joy, there is something fierce and uncompromising about its history, not only in the centuries before the time of Jesus but in the centuries after him, continuing even to our own day.

We are told twice in today’s gospel that Jesus ‘set his face’ towards Jerusalem. The holy city is the place of Mount Zion, the place of the Temple mount, and had come to symbolise the people and their relationship with God. The city is Israel and God’s dealings with Zion, the place of His dwelling, are God’s dealings with Israel, the people He has made His own. Jerusalem encapsulates all the joy and all the sorrow that have attended that covenant relationship over the centuries. It was the place where God revealed Himself most completely through the words of His prophets. It was the place of liturgy and sacrifice, offered in the presence of God.  It was the place of royal power from which the wisdom and guidance of God were to go forth to all the nations.

It is not right that a prophet should perish outside Jerusalem, Jesus says, and so when God finally sent His Son, the Son set his face towards Jerusalem. The first devastation of the city, with the loss of the Temple and the experience of exile, had eventually led to a new freedom in the people’s understanding of God and to a new intimacy in their relationship with God. The great prophets of the exile helped them towards that understanding and towards that new intimacy. God became at once more universal (Creator and Lord of all the earth) and more local (all the nations will come to Mount Zion), more transcendent (my ways and thoughts are far above) and more intimate (I will establish a new covenant written on human hearts).

The final destruction of Jerusalem is the killing of Jesus. He is Israel, the people called to be faithful. He is the Temple, the dwelling of God with human beings. He is destroyed in Jerusalem. His decision to set his face towards Jerusalem was not a political strategy, it was a theological necessity: he had come to do the Father’s will and that meant journeying towards Jerusalem. He is already living with complete freedom and total intimacy the relationship with the Father in which he wishes his disciples to share. As he journeys towards the earthly Jerusalem he is already living in the city that is to come. Through his death and resurrection in Jerusalem he has established a new freedom and a new intimacy in the relationship between His people and the Eternal Father: this is the grace of the New Testament, a new abiding of God with us, the grace carried in the earthen vessel that is the Church.

With each loss of Jerusalem there is a new and deeper understanding of God. With each loss of the Holy Place there is a new appreciation of the otherness and closeness of God. With each entry into the darkness of God’s absence there is a more profound realization of the way in which God has identified Himself with His people, abiding now in them wherever in the world they live as they abide in Him who is always near, always approaching, God’s face always set towards us.

Week 26 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Ezekiel 18:25-28; Psalm 25; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

The answer to Jesus’ question seems obvious: the one who did the Father’s will was the first son. Although at first he said he would not do it, he did it and the Father will clearly be more pleased with a son who says he won’t but then does rather than with a son who says he will but then does not.

It is the common teaching of Jesus elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel and throughout the New Testament. ‘Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (Matt 7:21). He is the one who builds his house on rock, hearing the words of Jesus and doing them. The foolish person also hears the words of Jesus but does not do them (Matt 7:24,26). Whoever does the will of his Father is, says Jesus, his brother and sister and mother (Matt 12:50).

James in his letter tells us to be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving ourselves (James 1.22). Paul talks about faith working through love as the essential activity of the Christian (Gal 5:6) and John in his first letter says that our love must not be simply in word and speech but in truth and in actions (I Jn 3:18).

So that’s all very clear – hypocrisy is a bad thing. Our thoughts and words must be consistent with our actions but if we have to choose between them then it is our actions that are most important. A follower of Christ is seen in how people act not in what they think or say. The saints are those who have ‘done love’ rather than simply admired it or preached it.

In the context of today’s liturgy, of course, the gospel parable is set in a slightly different context. The first reading allows for the possibility of people moving in and out of doing the Father’s will. The one who is a sinner can change to become law-abiding and honest. But the one who is law-abiding and honest can renounce his integrity to become a sinner. God is perfectly just, Ezekiel says, and will treat us according to where we have positioned ourselves: the sinner will die and the honest person will live.

An obvious question though is: when have we positioned ourselves definitively. The text of Ezekiel itself encourages us to think that we can be rescued from sin just as we might lose our integrity and fall into sin. For the New Testament, to have received the gift of the Spirit is to be definitively on the side of Christ, to have been baptised is to have been born again to a new life having died once and for all to sin.

But we know from our own experience – and Christian tradition has acknowledged it – that people do fall away even into serious sin and then, by God’s grace, are drawn back, become contrite and are reconciled to the Church. Not that we can be baptised all over again but the Church has the sacrament of reconciliation. That sacrament is a restoration of the new life of baptism in the one who has squandered it.

Traditionally death has been regarded as the moment when a person is definitively positioned in relation to God’s will, is fixed either as a sinner or as a person of integrity. The older ones among us will remember stories of very good people who commit one mortal sin and are then killed by a bus and it’s off to hell with them for all eternity. That always seemed a bit too simple, as if God had no memory and no understanding of human fickleness. And of course there is a lot more about this in the tradition. Most recently Edith Stein – Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – has written about God’s infinite patience and how it will find a way, respecting human freedom, to outwit the stubborn human will and seduce us (as Jeremiah would say) into the love of God which is what we’ve really wanted all along in spite of ourselves.

And there is also that great second reading from the Letter to the Philippians. We are to have the same mind as Christ Jesus, literally we are to be mindful in the way he was or we are to be practically wise in the way he was. This is what the term used means referring not so much to the mind of Christ as to his mindfulness, his way of being in relation to the Father.

What is being held up to us here is an even more radical possibility where the distinction between what I want and what the Father wants dissolves, or at least is of no further significance. So the gap between saying I will do it and actually doing it disappears and we have the possibility of a third son, the one who both says and does the Father’s will. This is perfectly found, of course, only in Jesus whom we believe to be without sin. Sin continues to distract and disturb us. Sin maintains the gap between our saying and our doing. But our destination is to have the same mindfulness as Jesus: it is where the Spirit is leading us.

The Spirit is the Spirit of love and to become involved in the love of God is to be on a road that will take us to the place where our will is emptied of its own desires … or better put our will has as its fundamental desire simply the will of the Father whom we love so that we do not need to be told ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ but we are taught interiorly by the prompting of the Spirit. ‘You do not need anyone to teach you’, John says in his first letter (2:27). ‘They will all know me and no longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother’, God says through Jeremiah, in what he says about the new covenant (31:31).

This following of Christ is not a magical thing, however, because it involves what Paul calls ‘the labour of love’. We see that labour most dramatically in the agony in the garden, where the Son is wrestling with what the Father’s will demands of him. ‘Let this cup pass me by’ is what the Son wants. ‘Let your will not mine be done’ is also what the Son wants. This is his deepest desire, to do what the Father wants, to bring his human will into line with the will of the Father and to cross that most difficult of gaps between knowing what is good and assenting to it, and being able actually to carry it out, to see it through.

We have the consolation of his struggle and his example. We have the help of the Holy Spirit, the love of God that has been poured into our hearts to make us the loving children of God also.

You can listen to this homily being preached here.

Week 26 Sunday (Year C)

Readings: Amos 6:1,4-7; Psalm 145; 1 Timothy 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

For the final ten years or so of his pontificate, John Paul II made constant use of a set of three ideas whenever he spoke about Christian life, the Church, or particular vocations within the Church. These three ideas are those of contemplation, communion and mission. He spoke of them so often and in such a way that they seemed to represent for him what we might call the Christian ‘gene’. In calling them the Christian gene what I mean is that this threefold reality will be found wherever there is Christian life. The structure of that form of life, its DNA if you like, is always contemplation, communion and mission. No matter what a person’s vocation or state in life, whether married or single, lay person, deacon, religious, priest or bishop, all through every instance of Christian life will be found some form of contemplation (prayer, thoughtfulness), some form of communion (friendship, love, being with others), and some form of mission (reaching out, witness, teaching).

The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus shows us what life is like without contemplation, without communion and without mission. It shows us the ‘anti-Christian life’, life outside the kingdom Christ came to establish. Instead of contemplation there is blindness. Instead of communion there is an unbridgeable gulf. Instead of mission there is paralysis and the death, it seems, of any hope.

The rich man did not see Lazarus until the urgency of his own situation in Hades led him to look up. Then he saw him. But when the poor man was lying at his gate, he did not see him. He presumably knew he was there, saw him physically as he passed in and out, but in any significant sense he did not ‘see’ him. He was blind to the man’s need, oblivious to the injustice of their situation. This is what riches do – Luke’s gospel has been telling us this again and again this year – riches, of whatever kind, tend to blind the one who is rich. It is not just our attitude to riches, Luke’s gospel teaches, but the simple fact of being rich that tends to coarsen people and make them insensitive.

If contemplation is the first element, communion is the second in the Christian gene, the DNA of Christian life. Again the parable shows us its opposite. There is no communication between the rich man and the poor man. There is no shared life, no communion. The most the poor man can hope for is the scraps from the rich man’s table, those pieces of bread used by the rich man and his guests to wipe their plates before throwing them on the ground for the dogs. The most the rich man can hope for is that Abraham might send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water to cool his burning tongue. But even then the rich man does not speak directly to Lazarus. He speaks instead to Abraham.

How sad it all is. It is the sadness of being strangers to one another, of not talking to one another, of misunderstanding and betrayal. It is the difficulty of coming to trust where there seems to be no basis for trust. These difficulties are found everywhere, in families and workplaces, in religious communities and in the Church itself, but that does not take away from their sadness. Instead of common ground there are unbridgeable chasms and gulfs that cannot be crossed, situations for which, it seems, there is no solution.

But God, as revealed in Jesus, is communion. The eternal happiness of God is the knowing and loving of one another of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have been called to share that life, the communion of mutual knowing and loving that God is. But we do not share it if we are not prepared to be in communion with one another: if we say we love God while hating our brother we are liars, Saint John tells us (1 John 4:20). We believe, though, that the unbridgeable gulfs and chasms that keep people apart and that even lead them to think of each other as enemies have been bridged by Christ. This is why we call him our Saviour and Redeemer. Saint Catherine of Siena was very fond of the image of Christ as a bridge, a pontifex, establishing communion between heaven and earth, a bridge that reaches from side to side to unite what seemed irreconcilable. The bridge, of course, is the cross of Christ, stretched across those gulfs and chasms, by which he has reconciled all things to God and enemies to one another, drawing all into one communion of love (Ephesians 2:11-22).

The third element of the Christian gene is mission. The Church as a whole, and all its individual members, live a life (or are called to be living a life) marked not only by contemplation (good seeing, prayer, thoughtfulness) and communion (shared life, friendship, love) but also by mission. Once again the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is helpful because it presents us with two people who are disempowered for different reasons. Remember, what we see in the parable is the ‘anti-Christian life’ and so there is no sense of mission here. The poor man is passive throughout, seems listless, not just when he is on earth allowing the dogs to lick his sores but in the afterlife also, as he reclines on the bosom of Abraham. The rich man is also impotent, paralysed. In this life he was blinded by his wealth, in the next he shows some concern, if only for his own brothers, but there is nothing, it seems, that he can do.

The person who believes in Christ, on the other hand, and who is therefore living this life of contemplation and communion, will not be powerless. There is always something that can be done. The life Christ gives us is about action, bearing fruit, following him, going and doing likewise, taking up our own cross, keeping his commandment of love. It is not just that we decide we should do something because we have received so much. It is just that the form of life we are talking about is of itself fruit-bearing and action-producing. If it does not do that then the gene is somehow defective, the DNA is missing some of its parts. If there is contemplation and communion then there will be mission also.

Sometimes people think Christianity is a recipe for passivity in this world. Although the lives and sometimes the teaching of Christians have on occasion contributed to this view, it remains a profound misunderstanding. There is always something to be done. If the life we are living is one of contemplation and communion leading to mission there will be some fruitfulness in our lives. We can seek the truth, for example. We can pray. We can think about things: how the world would change if more time and space were given to good thinking. Was it not Pascal, the French philosopher, who remarked that half the world’s problems would be solved if only people could sit quietly in a room for an hour (or words to that effect). We can study. We can hold others in mind. We can try to know ourselves better. We can try to know and love others better.

Sometimes when we think of ‘doing something’ we think immediately of the public, social world, even the political world. God knows there is great need for a Christian presence in the public world, not just the presence of Christians but the presence of those things that characterise Christian living, once again contemplation and communion.

If Lazarus is listless and the rich man is trapped we are always full of confidence. It is a confidence based not on our own abilities. It is based on the life Christ has shared with us and it flows naturally from that life when it is healthy, a life of contemplation and communion bearing fruit in our service of Christ and of his Church.