Week 34 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Daniel  2:31-45; Daniel 3:57-61; Luke 21:5-11

It does not seem fair. It seems very unfair in fact: this extraordinary climax to a drama in which none of us chose to get involved in the first place. It is all God's idea - to invent the thing and keep it going. Why should he get so furious if his creatures make mistakes or opt out or lose interest?

We find ourselves within this story, like characters in a play, at the mercy of the creator, the writer of the story. To opt out, to say I do not want to have anything more to do with this God or with the Christian story, is simply to move to a different part of the stage, to take on a different role in the same play.

We seem to be trapped. And the stakes at the end are so high: at least if the gospel readings of these next three days are true. An extraordinary fate awaits us, who never really chose to be involved in this drama in the first place, who never agreed to play for such high stakes. And the preacher is supposed to do what seems like some kind of mental gymnastics to show how all this talk of judgement and punishment, fire and disaster, fearful sights and great signs from heaven, is just another angle on our good God, who is only love, only truth, only goodness.

On the other hand it is all true and deadly serious. There are wars and revolutions. Hundreds of people have died through violence in the past weeks. There are plagues and famines. There are fearful sights.  There is unimaginable cruelty and exploitation of women, of children, of men too. There is betrayal and violence and persecution.

We are here whether we like it or not. And we need salvation here: light in which to understand, and help to make changes that are beyond our capacity, if we are to grow towards the fulness of our being.

It is a strange story, all the stranger for being true. It is not armchair stuff. We have to be ready to do battle. We have to be ready to fight for our souls. We have to be ready to defend love and justice. We have to be ready for tears and sweat. We have to be ready to lay down our lives.

We do not know what God is. As life moves on the answer to the question 'what is God?' becomes more elusive. As the world's history moves on the answer to this question too seems ever more elusive. But we believe that Jesus Christ is God's best word about himself. He is a word of truth and love, of blessing and healing. He is the image of the unseen God, the first-born of all creation (and so he is fundamental to our being in the story at all) and he is the first to be born from the dead (and so he is the principle of our salvation into eternal life). He has made peace, but it is by his death on the cross that he has done it.

Although he dwelt among us as truth and love, as blessing and healing, although he worked deeds that brought life, forgiveness and freedom, still, this word spoken by the Father from all eternity, dwelling in time with us, provoked opposition and fear, violence and hatred. Wherever that same word is still proclaimed authentically and wherever his message is truly lived, it still provokes these things.

It is all very strange. Jesus teaches, and shows, that love is the first and the last word about God. And yet Jesus provokes the world's hatred and violence.  It is not always easy to see that love is the last as it is the first word. Sometimes it is very difficult to see this, whether in some pages of the Bible (which in this simply reflect the reality of the human world) or in the events of our own lives.

Feast of Christ the King (Year C)

Readings: 2 Samuel 5:1-3; Psalm 122; Colossians 1:12-20; Luke 23:35-43

In ancient Rome, 'dignity' referred to the weight of authority a public figure gained through his experience and service of a community. Later it was something attached to public roles even where there was a distance, more or less great, between the personal character of the occupant and the significance of the role. Thus popes and presidents, prime ministers and monarchs, are 'dignified', even where there is such a distance, because of what they represent for the ones they serve. If the distance becomes too great, of course, something has to be done!

Although the prophet Isaiah foretells that the suffering Messiah would have 'no beauty that we should desire him', Jesus is in fact the only person in whom there is no distance at all between the person he is and the roles he occupies. There is a simple identity of who he is and what he does, and both his person and his roles are worthy of the highest dignity.

Biblical and Christian tradition teaches us that he is the priest, the prophet, and the king. The readings for today's feast, not surprisingly, talk about him as a king, king of Israel of the royal house of David, and king of the Jews in his enthronement on the cross.

The events of his passion leave him with no dignity at all, as Isaiah had foretold: dressed in royal purple only in order to be mocked and spat at, crowned with thorns rather than jewels, his triumphal procession is the way of the cross, his enthronement is his being nailed to its wood, and his exaltation in the sight of the people is his being lifted up on that cross. He was despised and rejected, the man of sorrows acquainted with grief. Nothing seems further from the 'wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father and prince of peace', to whom earlier sections of Isaiah had looked forward.

Yet he continues to speak of his 'kingdom'. It is not of this world, he tells Pilate, and now, from the cross, he tells the thief that today he will be with him, Jesus, in 'paradise'. As king and shepherd of his people he leads them - us - not into a new historical period, or a new political arrangement, or a new era of prosperity. He opens the way into a new reality, of which he is the beginning, the head, and the king. Compared to this new reality all that we know is darkness and his is the kingdom of light. From the cross he judges the world by his love and his truth. He is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we read elsewhere, the only true king, because this 'first-born of creation' is now also 'first-born from the dead'.

The Church, his body, is the sign and foretaste of his kingdom which today's liturgy tells us is a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace. But we can never forget that this divine and human reality has been established through his death on the cross.

'Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God', the liturgy invites us as we contemplate his sacrifice. Dignum et iustum est, we reply. It is a difficult phrase to translate well - 'it is right and fitting', 'it is meet and just'. But notice that ancient Roman word 'dignity'. In spite of its being trampled underfoot, we acknowledge the weight of authority in this man, this man of incomparable dignity. Ecce homo, Christ our King, in whom all things hold together, through whom and for whom all things were created, through whom and for whom all things were redeemed.

This homily was first published on the Torch website for the Feast of Christ the King 2010

Saint Cecilia - 22 November

This homily was given during Evensong at Magdalen College, Cambridge, for the feast of Saint Cecilia, 22 November 2010. The readings were Wisdom 4:10-15 and 2 Corinthians 4:7-16.

How few sermons or homilies we remember! It is salutary for the preacher to recall this from time to time. One sermon that has always stayed strong in my memory is part of a sermon given by Bishop Fulton Sheen which I heard in a church in Dublin sometime in the summer of 1967 or 1968. He was giving a mission in the city and I was working as a messenger boy for a 'gentleman's outfitters', as they were called at the time. Sent on an errand which took me past the church where he was speaking, I was able to pop in for a couple of minutes to see and hear the famous preacher. I have always remembered what he was saying during those few minutes. If an instrument in an orchestra hits a bum note, he said, there is no way that the note can be unplayed. It has forever been sounded (especially if it has come from a trombone or a double bass) and it reverberates across the concert hall, across the city, across the country, across the universe ... the only possible way of rectifying the situation - and it is a radical one - is to get the composer to take that bum note and make it the first note in a new work. Fulton Sheen applied this to Adam and Eve, and to humanity's fall, and God's response to that fall, taking the bum note of sin and making it the first note in the great new symphony of redemption.

It is a useful musical analogy and quite appropriate for St Cecilia's Day. For many people music itself is a kind of 'spirituality', perhaps even the height of spirituality, for its power to express, to stimulate, and to reconcile so much of human experience.

But the distinctive doctrines of the Christian faith can also be meditated on from this perspective. I have recalled Fulton Sheen's musical analogy. The Divine Composer will achieve the work he has conceived, weaving into it the discordant notes, the mistakes, the silences, and the wrong turnings, which the human interpreters of that work inevitably introduce into its performance. Not only can he work those things into his composition, he can use those things to illustrate even more powerfully the beauty of his work.

We can say this not just about the history of salvation in general, but about each individual history of salvation. For example, St Paul, in our second reading, describes his experience in phrases that are wonderfully musical: troubled, but not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. It continues into the climax of that passage,

bearing in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus,

that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

This is the distinctive Christian chord, the phrase at the heart of our faith, the melody of our life's song - so we profess in our baptism and seek to live out from day to day - dying with Christ, to sin, so as to live with him, by grace, and for you.

Some translations of 'the grace', or blessing, with which 2 Corinthians ends refer to 'the harmony of the Holy Spirit' where we are more accustomed to 'fellowship' or 'communion' (koinonia). There are many images and metaphors for the Spirit in the Christian tradition - other beautiful ones such as the kiss, or laughter - but let us stay with harmony for now, because it is St Cecilia's Day.

Some recent theology - I am thinking particularly of Hans Urs von Balthasar - speak in terms of Father and Son being 'stretched' by the work of revelation and salvation, the Son travelling into a far country to rescue the lost, putting the relationship of Father and Son itself under strain as the Son descends even into hell. The just man to whom the first reading refers, taken away from 'the bewitching of naughtiness and the wandering of concupiscence', the Son, the Word, became flesh and entered fully into that place of naughtiness and concupiscence so as to heal and strengthen it from within.

Did this journey of the Son threaten the harmony between Father and Son? Is this what those harsh cries in Gethsemane and Golgotha mean? The creation that is in travail, groaning in its one great act of giving birth, witnesses to its own transformation in the body of the Incarnate Son. The great symphony of creation and redemption is centred on that moment of silence in which he breathed forth his Spirit, the harmony, the love of Father and Son, and of God for the world, which endures this greatest dissonance and, from the far side of it, initiates the radically new movement of the resurrection, a new creation.

We believe that God opened his heart and revealed his life in that moment of deepest silence. What is revealed is the life of love that God is and far from being a threat to the harmony of those relations the blood of Jesus seals a new and eternal covenant. This moment did not threaten the harmony of Father and Son. It was, rather, the moment when all humanity, and creation itself, were incorporated into the harmony of the divine symphony which is the life of the Blessed Trinity. God is a complex note, or a chord, or a phrase, that expresses power and wisdom and love, taking in and reconciling and bringing into a higher, enduring harmony, the troubled, distressed, perplexed, persecuted, and cast down world.

We celebrate our faith in this mystery not just by singing a new song in the choir but by singing  a new song in our lives.  Lovers sing, St Augustine reminds us, and the bearers of a new love must sing a new song.

Presentation of Mary -- 21 November

In Praise of Older Women

The Book of Sirach invites us ‘to sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations’ (44.1). I would like to change that very slightly and sing the praises of famous women, the other half of our ancestry. I do this because during the second half of November the Church celebrates the memory of a number of great women, outstanding for learning and holiness. As married women, as mothers, as religious sisters or as single women, these heroines of the Christian people continue to inspire, if not in the universal church, then at least in some part of it.

Margaret of Scotland (d.1093), wife, mother and queen is remembered on November 16th as is Gertrude (d.1301), philosopher, scholar and spiritual teacher. November 17th is the feast of Elizabeth of Hungary (d.1231), wife of a German prince, mother of a large family, a woman devoted to prayer and the care of the poor.

November 22nd is the feast of Saint Cecilia, a Roman martyr who became (through a mistranslation of the account of her death, it must be admitted) patron saint of music and of musicians in the Church. The Passion of Saint Cecilia recounts the circumstances of her martyrdom and there has been a basilica in her honour at Rome since the 5th century.

Towards the end of the month in the old calendar came the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (November 25th). There was a remarkable cult in her memory throughout Western Europe for many centuries. And she gives her name to a firework, the ‘catherine’ wheel. Legend has it that Catherine was a brilliant philosopher who confounded the pagan teachers of Alexandria with the depth and skill of her thinking. Sadly this Catherine, Christian philosopher, cannot be mentioned without speaking of her pagan counterpart, Hypatia, also of Alexandria, who died about 400. She too was a woman of great intelligence and religious insight, one of the last great philosophical teachers of the ancient world whose students included at least one Christian bishop, Synesius of Cyrene. It seems undeniable that Hypatia’s cruel murder came about through the envy and resentment of an ignorant Christian mob.

Gertrude the Great, already mentioned, stands at the centre of a group of remarkable women scholars and mystics of the high middle ages. She was taught by Mechtild of Hackeborn (d.1298) and they were later joined by Mechtild of Magdeburg (died about 1290), to name only the most famous of them. Although these women did not pass through the normal school system that was not always a disadvantage. They gave an independent slant to what they were learning, for example in being free not to follow Augustine in all he had to say about hell. For these women the love of God in Christ is stronger than any resistance it encounters and so it is Christian to hope for the salvation of all.

But back to November, and to today, November 21st, the day on which the Church celebrates the Presentation in the Temple of the Blessed Virgin Mary, her dedication to God from her earliest years. It is fitting that this remembrance of great women should end with reference to the Mother of the Lord, she who is ‘blessed among all women’. Certain kinds of piety and devotion sweeten her image and make her seem unreal, ethereal, idealised, a woman, yes, but hardly a woman of flesh and blood and so of less use to us than she ought to be.

The gospel texts about Mary paint a different picture. Her trust in the ways of God, her love and fidelity towards her Son, her prophetic praise of God in the Magnificat — all of this places her among the heroines of Israel: people like Esther and Judith, the mothers of the kings, Hannah and many other women, under the old and the new covenants, who have been courageous in faith, reliable in wisdom, and tender in love. We pray that we may be like her, like them.

Week 33 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: 1 Maccabees 1:10-15, 41-43, 54-57, 62-63; Psalm 119; Luke 18:35-43

The readings from Maccabees have a modern feel. There are issues of national identity and religious tolerance, with which the world still grapples, and already they are proving tricky to negotiate. It seems at first as if Antiochus Epiphanes is the model of an enlightened secular ruler: 'all should be one people'. But the price of this is that each should 'abandon his particular customs'. Modern secularists do not begin from this point: they will want to assure us that everybody can retain and celebrate his particular customs. So far so good.

Likewise Antiochus' plan makes good progress, non-Jews seem to have no difficulty with it. But as things develop it becomes clear that his 'secularism', as it must be, is in reality another religious position which, to be true to itself, must begin to impose its values and practices on everybody. And that means eliminating values and practices that are too strongly identitarian, that seem to be exclusive, and so threaten the universalist, pluralist project. So they trespass on Jewish holy places and begin to destroy Jewish holy books, punishing with death anybody who insists on observing the 'particular customs' that belong to the Jewish law. Presumably the Maccabees and their supporters will have been branded as fanatics as they might continue to seem fanatical to enlightened modern ears.

Such ideas and movements continue to present huge challenges to human societies. Jesus does not give any specific answer to this set of questions and concerns. He does not engage in political philosophy, still less in politics. What he does do is restore sight to the blind and perhaps that is the most fundamental need of humanity in all the difficulties it faces. We need to see, to see more, to see more clearly, to see more calmly, to see together, to see each other, to open up spaces of freedom and conversation where human beings can share their deepest desires and fears. 'Live and let live' is a good starting point but it only takes us so far in a world of competing interests, a world with such a deep chasm between power and powerlessness, between the rich contentment of the developed world and so much poverty and oppression elsewhere, so much exclusion and humiliation.

Humiliation - it seems to be the most powerful force in the genesis of violence. The humiliation of the Jewish people by Antiochus Epiphanes provokes the violent rebellion of the Maccabees. The people with Jesus wanted to keep the blind man quiet, in the background, out of the way. He had to assert himself, shouting all the louder. Jesus receives him as He wants to receive every man and woman, saying to them what he says to the blind man, 'what do you want me to do for you?'

This week, as we reflect on the problems of our world and their terrible cost in human suffering, it is good to keep this question in mind, a question from the Son of God to all human beings: 'what do you want me to do for you?' And we know, if we see anything clearly, that our answer cannot include the humiliation, exclusion, or destruction of other creatures. We must find ways not just to live and let live, but to live together, to walk together on the road of life. It is what Jesus makes possible for the blind man: at the end he is no longer sitting by the way but following Jesus on that road. It is what the Lord of life wants for everybody, that we seek constantly to overcome our blindnesses and so learn to walk together on the road of life.

Week 33 Sunday (Year C)

Readings: Malachi 3:19-20; Psalm 97; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-13; Luke 21:5-19

The Christian Bible re-ordered the books of the Hebrew Scriptures placing the prophets rather than the writings as the final part of the 'old testament'. It means the Christian Old Testament ends on a note of hope and expectancy, looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, to God's visitation of his people in a new moment and to the judgement and salvation that will come with that visitation.

More specifically the Old Testament ends with the prophecy of Malachi from which we read a short passage today. Fire is coming, the prophet says. For those who have done evil it is a fire that will judge and cauterize the evil. For the just, and in particular the oppressed and the poor who are yet to be vindicated, this fire is the sun of justice bringing healing in its rays.

Across the Christian centuries those reflecting on the message of the scriptures have seen that there is just this one fire on the great and terrible day of the Lord, the fire of love and truth that will be experienced differently by different individuals, according to each one's spiritual and moral circumstances and situation. So the Irish philosopher-theologian of the 9th century, John Scottus Eriugena, and so also the 15th century Italian mystic of purgatory, Catherine of Genoa: one fire, experienced by the arrogant in one way and by the humble in another.

Saint Augustine writes in one of his sermons about this two-edged character of the fire of God's Word: 'The Word of God is the adversary of your will', he says, 'until it can become the author of your salvation. As long as you are your own enemy, you also have God's Word as your enemy; be a friend to yourself, and you agree with it'.

For Dante Alighieri everything is the work of God's love. All sin is a pathology of love, love misdirected, love insufficient, love excessive and disproportionate, love incomplete. 'Do you believe in purgatory', a priest was asked recently. 'I am counting on it', was his answer, which many of us do as we get older. The purging and sifting of motivation and fidelity, the removal of evil desires, the redirection of love, the refining fire of divine justice - all of this is painful, all of it included in the gathering in of redemption's harvest, all of it at root the work of an infinite Love.

The readings this Sunday are in tune not only with the time of the year, at least in the Northern hemisphere, but also with the situation of the world. November is the dark end of the dying year, a time when we remember the dead and ponder on death, the disorder and disintegration that faces each of us individually, the chaos and disaster of our life's ending which draws ever closer. But also in the moment of history through which we are living it seems there is much disorder and disintegration, political and cosmic, or at least there is in many people a fear of those things. New leaders arise who promise protection against chaos and disaster but whose promises seem to others to invite those very things.

What are we to do in such circumstances? We are to go on quietly working and earning the food that we eat, Paul says to the Thessalonians. Whatever comes about is an opportunity to bear witness, Jesus says in the passage from Luke's gospel that we read today. What holds it all together, beneath and beyond any chaos or disintegration, any disaster or catastrophe, is the mighty arm of God. Do not prepare your defence, Jesus says, because you will be given, by Jesus himself, an eloquence and a wisdom that none will be able to resist or contradict.

Be a friend to yourself, Augustine wrote, and then the Word of God is your friend, your wisdom, and your salvation.We have been entrusted with the Word of truth and love, to speak it in our words and to witness to it in our actions. We do not have access to the whole picture, not even to the day on which our personal world will dissolve in death. But we have confidence in the mighty and gentle arms of the One who has carried His people through countless disasters, across countless years, through countless reconciliations. Those arms, now stretched on the cross, embrace the world and its history completely. That heart, opened before our eyes, burns with a love that brings judgement, yes, and painful reconstruction, but it is the Sun of Justice, the fire Jesus came to ignite on earth, the fire of God's love and friendship. If God has befriended us, we can befriend ourselves and so open up to the healing and saving power of God's Word. We can be what we are called to be, bearers of the divine fire, who will set the world ablaze.

Week 32 Saturday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 18:14-16; 19:6-9; Luke 18:1-8

It is tempting to take this parable as a kind of self-contained teaching about prayer, in which case the final comment of Jesus, ‘when the Son of Man comes will he find any faith on earth?’, will seem like a kind of retaliation in advance in case you have not received what you’ve prayed for: ‘well did you have enough faith’, something like that. But this is to misunderstand the parable and the significance of that final comment which is not just tagged on. Because what it does, this final question from Jesus, is bind the parable securely into the longer section of the gospel that precedes it and which we have been reading at Mass all this week. That whole section is about the coming of the Son of Man and the parable is about the kind of attitude we ought to have in relation, not just to anything we might want or desire, but in relation precisely to that coming, the coming of the Son of Man. We are to long for it, and seek it from God, as earnestly and as confidently as the widow pesters the unjust judge.

If this is the context then it is not accidental that what the widow is seeking is justice. She is not looking for a new washing machine or a Christmas holiday in the Canary Islands. There is another time and place to think about that kind of praying. But the kind of praying she is involved in here is eschatological. It is about the end of the world as we know it. What she is looking for is justice, in other words the judgement of God, that final act in which God will reveal himself as the champion of the poor and oppressed, the Father of the orphans and the widows whose God he has long promised to be. In a parallel parable in Luke about a man disturbing his friend at night we read that God will give not just ‘good things’ to his people as Matthew puts it, but ‘the Holy Spirit’. In Luke it is very clear that God knows what we need and that we can be brought to pray not just for what we want but for what we need: in the one case the Holy Spirit, in this case justice.

The unjust judge is a kind of foil, an absurd comparison with God, so that Jesus can underline that we can confidently look to God, a judge who is absolutely just, to hear the cry of those who call out to Him for justice. He will answer speedily. Or will he? The text gets a bit confused and the translations vary because it seems to say that God will answer speedily even if he delays. But when he does answer it will be quickly. Or something like that.

This confusion about what we might call the timeline involved here is another thing that alerts us to the fact that what Jesus is speaking about is the coming of the Son of Man. When will this widow’s prayer be answered? It will be answered on the day of the Lord, for it is the justice of that day that she seeks. At what time will this widow’s prayer be answered? It will be answered at an hour you do not expect. Just as we heard earlier this week that the kingdom of God is neither here nor there but is in the midst of us, so the kingdom of God is neither now nor then but is coming upon us. Space and time are refashioned as we are taken into this kingdom of God that is already among us and for whose consummation we are to pray.

The first reading speaks of the power of God’s Word to leap from his throne in heaven and to come as a stern warrior carrying the sword of death and with the power to re-fashion creation. This strange world, the world of the end times, the world of the apocalypse, is the world in which this widow is praying. Surely she is another feminine figure representing the Church, representing all of us. Jesus presents her to us as an example of the faith and confidence we need to persevere in prayer in this world. She is praying in a wild world of corruption and justice seeking, where goodness and evil do battle, and where cries of distress call out for a re-fashioning of things that can only come, it seems, from God himself. The world in which she is praying is a terrible one that seems God-forsaken and yet she continues to cry out for justice. She keeps faith and hope that she will surely be vindicated even though the world in which she prays is this world in which we are living.

Of course we could continue these reflections in the direction of Jesus’ own experience of dereliction and injustice, his cries of distress in Gethsemane and from the Cross. In that hour in which goodness and evil are most dramatically ranged against each other we believe that the justice of our just judge has been revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The divine re-fashioning of creation has begun. We enter into that strange world which is already here whenever we celebrate the paschal mystery in the Eucharistic sacrifice.

And we try to be obedient to what Jesus teaches us in this parable because each time we celebrate the sacred mysteries we declare ourselves to be waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Sun of Justice.