Saint Luke, Evangelist -- 18 October

Readings: 2 Timothy 4:10-17b; Psalm 145: Luke 10:1-9

St Paul mentions Luke, one of his co-workers, a few times — Philemon 23-24, 2 Timothy 4.11 and Colossians 4.14 where he refers to Luke as ‘the beloved physician’. There is no good reason to doubt the early Church’s attribution of the third gospel to Luke. And the Acts of the Apostles as well of course, since the Gospel of Luke and the Acts go together.

Luke seems to have been a person of particular sensitivity and gentleness. The picture of Jesus we gain from Luke is correspondingly sensitive and compassionate, with an eye always to the unfortunate and the afflicted.

Luke has been described (by Dante) as ‘the recorder of the tenderness of Christ’ and this comes through in a number of ways. Think, for example, of parables which are found only in Luke’s gospel: the good Samaritan (Luke 10), the prodigal son (Luke 15), the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18) to name just four of them. If asked to pick out stories that best summarise the good news of Christianity I bet we would all include at least the first two.

In both parables the turning point is when one human being is moved with compassion at the distress of another and does something to help. The good Samaritan, unlike the priest and Levite who passed by, is ‘moved with compassion’ to help the unfortunate man he sees on the Jericho road. The prodigal son is on his way home, and is still a good way off, when his father sees him, is ‘moved with compassion’ and rushes out to embrace him.

Luke uses the same Greek word in both places. And he uses it again in telling how Jesus encountered a funeral procession in the town of Nain, that of a man who was the only son of his widowed mother (Luke 7: it is typical of Luke to note things which deepen the sadness of situations: the ‘only’ son and she a ‘widow’.) Here, Luke tells us, Jesus himself is ‘moved with compassion’ and restores the man to life.

The miracles recorded only by Luke often have some added reason for compassion. The woman bent over (Luke 13), the man with dropsy (Luke 14), and Zaccheus the tax-collector too small to see Jesus (Luke 19), are all afflicted in ways that might well have led to them being laughed at and jeered.

Some have suggested that Luke’s medical background explains his interest in the details of various conditions. Perhaps it is enough that his sensitivity drew him to relate events which best illustrate the compassion of our Lord.

A further illustration of this compassion is in the words from the cross which Luke records (Luke 23). The first is ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’. The concern of Jesus for the plight of others remains to the very end. In the same spirit is his assurance to the good thief, ‘today you will be with me in paradise’. And his final word is a prayer, ‘Father into your hands I commend my spirit’.

Luke, recorder of Christ’s gentleness, is symbolised by a bull or ox. This is the biblical symbol (Apocalypse 4) traditionally assigned to him, because his gospel begins with Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, offering incense in the temple at Jerusalem, the place of sacrifice. The compassion which permeates Luke’s gospel may seem fragile and vulnerable before the powers of this world but we believe that this kind love which comes from God is stronger than anything in creation. The ox is a symbol of this strength.

It is always good to read the gospel of Luke, to make it our spiritual reading — if only to realise how much our appreciation and love of Jesus of Nazareth have been shaped by what we learn from this gentle physician.

Week 28 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 1:1-10; Psalm 98; Luke 11:47-54

In Luke's account, Jesus is invariably gentler than he is presented in Matthew or in Mark, whether in regard to the apostles and disciples or in regard to the enemies of Jesus. But of course the end result is the same: Jesus is crucified. Today's gospel contains woes against various elements in the religious authorities, as incisive if not as insulting as the woes against the scribes and Pharisees that we find in Matthew 23. And the end result is the same: they are increasingly angry with him and with what he is saying about them to the people.

Here they are described as 'scholars of the law' and 'those who build the monuments of the prophets' but it is the same scribes and Pharisees who see that the criticisms are leveled against them and who react accordingly. The scholars of the law have taken away the key of knowledge, not entering themselves but not allowing anybody else to enter either. A less clearly defined group, those who build the monuments of the prophets, are those who support prophets as long as they are dead but whenever a living prophet arises will be among the first to make sure he is silenced.

Religious teachers and authorities have to listen carefully to these words and examine their own thoughts, words, deeds and omissions in the light of them. Just like everybody else, and even more so, they are called to repent and to position themselves in God's way of bringing in the kingdom of grace. The challenge to them is to remain open to the Spirit who breathes where he will and who cannot be confined to particular institutions or doctrines or practices. And yet it is the same Spirit who establishes and animates the institutions and doctrines and practices in which the relationship with God is lived and understood and celebrated.

It is too simple to set up here an easy contrast between Judaism and Christianity. It is too easy also to set up an easy contrast between institutional types and charismatic types, or between priestly types and prophetic types, between radicals who are faithful to the wild call of the gospel and liberals who will always be at hand to anoint the bodies of dead prophets and to bury martyred apostles. Often the best we can manage is to live between such polarities, making efforts to keep people together, complementing each other in the ways in which they bear witness to the truth of God.

But the mystery of God's will is that all things are summed up in Christ. It is Christ who is the recapitulation of all things. We are not going to do it no matter what our political or intellectual achievements. It is Christ who brings all together, opening the door of knowledge and revealing the glory of God's grace. We are not going to do it no matter what our institutional structures, our grand strategies or our good intentions.

When the Blood of this prophet is shed, and the blood of this Apostle is poured out, it is the moment of the world's redemption. He is not just one more martyred prophet in the line running from Abel to Zechariah. This dead body is not to be contained in any tomb, to be honoured once a year by those claiming to be his heirs. Because it has been carried to the throne of grace, this Blood flows forever, redeeming and bringing forgiveness. The power of this Blood tears the curtain of the Temple and opens the way to a new knowledge and a new life. This is the Blood which establishes unity between the persecuted and those who killed them. This is the Blood which heals the world's wounds, forgives the world's sins, and lavishes grace on the world.

The preaching of this truth and the testimony to this grace continue to invite rejection and persecution. That preaching and that testimony continue to call us to repent and to change, to position ourselves in God's way of bringing in the kingdom of grace. And that, it seems, will always be some kind of threat to us, a subversion of our comfort, a relativisation of our achievements, a criticism of our best intentions, changes in our way of living. Only the Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets, will keep us on this road of repentance, ready to learn and to change again, the Spirit who bears witness with the water and the Blood to the riches of God's grace.

Week 28 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 5:18-25; Psalm 1; Luke 11:42-46

There is a beautiful image in today's responsorial psalm. The one who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it is like a tree planted by the water's edge. He yields fruit in due season, his leaves never fade, and all he does prospers. Such a person has well-placed roots. The spring of life and energy and action in her is healthy and reliable and fruitful.

St Paul knew this psalm very well. He is the most famous Pharisee to come to faith in Jesus and what he says about the law and the Spirit is therefore of great interest. He contrasts them, yes, but not as two alternative codes of law, one detailed and negative, the other general and positive. It is rather that any person's ability to keep the law of God - which we all ought to do - depends on his or her being planted in the Spirit, rooted in that divine gift of living water. Paul had come to realise that the positive fruits of the law could only be borne by people living in the Spirit. The law is good and wise and true as he says elsewhere. But without the Spirit any effort to live by the law will be 'fleshly', it will inevitably be partial and external, selective and more or less hypocritical.

It can be tempting to set up an easy opposition between 'old testament law' and 'new testament spirit'. But to give in to this tempation would be a very serious misunderstanding of the gospel, and of the whole history of salvation. The new law is not an alternative to the old law but is its full flourishing. The new law, of which the prophets already spoke, is the life of the faithful believer flowing from his or her communion with the Lord, the God of Israel. What will secure that communion for us?

Jesus himself warns us off this facile opposition through a couple of clues in today's gospel reading. 'These you should have done', he says, referring to justice and the love of God, 'without overlooking the others', those more minor matters of the law which the faithful person will also want to observe, because they are part of God's law.

The second clue comes in his response to the lawyer. 'You impose on people burdens too hard to carry', Jesus says. The yoke or burden is another image for God's law which guides the steps of the one who submits to it. In Matthew's gospel Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden (same term as here) is light. What makes it an easy yoke? That is does not ask very much of us? What makes it a light burden? That its demands are superficial and not radical? He is speaking of the cross and walking behind him on that way. So too is Paul in Galatians: 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world' (6:14). He speaks of crucifixion in today's first reading also, another warning against any understanding of Christian discipleship that would under-estimate its costliness.

The tree by the water's edge is the cross of Christ planted in our earth. Just down the road from where I now live is the church of San Clemente with its renowned mosaic of the cross as the tree of life. This dry and dead wood, irrigated by the blood of the one dying upon it, becomes a living tree from which flows the water of the river of life, the gift of the Spirit, the sacramental life of the Church. This is the light and eternally fruitful burden we are asked to accept and to carry. Its power reaches the depths of our hearts, irrigating the dry and dead places,  filling us with its own love. That love is the Holy Spirit who enables us to observe the law of God and so to bear the fruit of the cross: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against which there is no law, but which are the fulfillment of the law of God, God's intention for His people.

Saint Teresa of Avila - 15 October

TERESA OF AVILA

1515 - 1582

 

One of Teresa's best friends and key advisers was Domingo Banez, one of the greatest of the 16th century Spanish Dominican theologians who helped her find her way through mystical experiences, defended her before the Inquisition, and saved the Carmelite reform from ruin. There were quite a few other men in Teresa’s life too (after Jesus, of course). Her flirtation with some young fellow at the age of 16 brought shame on the family (by the standards of 16th century Catholic Spain) and led to her being sent away to a boarding school. She was fondest, it seems, of Jeronimo Gracian, thirty years younger, the first provincial of the reformed Carmelite friars. Another great ally was St John of the Cross, the man with whom she is most often remembered, whom she greatly admired, but whom she found just a wee bit intense and humourless.

Teresa’s conversion to a serious following of Christ coincided with a midlife crisis. She had been plagued by illness and frustration throughout her twenties and thirties, finding life in the convent not that much different from life in the world outside. The sisters seemed more concerned with social status and the political interests of their families than with building spiritual companionship, which was what Teresa understood a religious community to be about. She could point no fingers, however, because her own life of faith and prayer was dry and dreary, and conditions in the convent were not helping her to move forward.

Reading Augustine’s Confessions, and seeing a particular picture representing the sufferings of Jesus, opened things up for her. We can think of her moving from a notional to a real assent, to use John Henry Newman’s terms, moving from a sincere acceptance of the truth of the Gospel that nevertheless left her lethargic and depressed, to a real acceptance of the truth of the Gospel that filled her with energy and zeal. Such a real acceptance is, of course, not the outcome of human effort alone but part of the teaching that the Spirit effects in those seeking to follow Christ (Luke 12:12). Teresa’s account of this change is given in her Autobiography, a book read by Edith Stein during the course of a single night in 1921, bringing about her conversion to the Catholic faith, awakening her vocation to the Carmelites, and opening for her the way of perfection.

It is never perfect human beings that Teresa has in mind when she talks, as she does often, about perfection. She had plenty of experience of religious life, after all. That which is perfect is the love of God revealed in Christ and transforming us by making us thirsty in a way that will never be completed, never perfected, in this world. The encounter between great Christians like Augustine, Teresa, and Edith Stein reminds us that the entire community of the Church, not just religious communities within it, ought to be a place of spiritual companionship, a friendship established on the deepest thing we can share, what St Paul describes as ‘the righteousness of faith resting on grace’ (Romans 4:13,16).

Teresa then spends the second half of her life here, there and everywhere in Spain, founding monasteries, negotiating with bishops, coping with problems in the communities, and writing great works like The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, works that remain among the wisest and most accessible guidebooks to the ways of prayer.

It is in the Book of her Foundations, though, that Teresa’s personality shines through most clearly. She is witty, shrewd, down to earth, sincere, full of fear, full of courage, single-minded in her love and service of Christ. Far from being a retiring and diffident contemplative, she is fully occupied with people and with business, showing remarkable political skill in handling the many problems connected with her foundations – the legal processes of buying property, the patience needed to deal with townspeople, benefactors, and bishops (‘through her, friends become enemies’, quipped one bishop), the prudence needed to choose suitable women for the new communities and especially the prioresses (some of them are very holy, she says, and not suited to being prioresses), the rivalry of other religious orders, the resentment of the other Carmelites, the brooding presence of the Inquisition. As regards the last, in introducing one of her writings she says, ‘I ask God to give me the grace not to say anything that might merit my being denounced to the Inquisition’ (Satirical Critique). She seemed so hemmed in and pinned down by practical worries and temporal responsibilities that her freedom in following Christ in all of this, and in spite of all of this, is all the more striking.

Because a sense of humour is one of the surest signs of a real assent to God, it is not surprising that there is much humour in the life of Teresa of Avila. A herd of bulls comes between the sisters and their convent one night and they barely manage to slip in unnoticed. Teresa is highly amused by this turn of events but neither she nor any of the other sisters is tempted to become Spain’s first matadora. On the sisters’ first night in another foundation they discovered that they had brought five clocks but no bed. One benefactor insists that the chapel he has paid for should also have a font containing orange-flower water, and Teresa is somewhat bemused by this.

Encouraged by Banez, her Dominican confessor and director, she is famously sceptical of mystical experiences in spite of having a few remarkable ones herself and she warns people constantly about putting any store by unusual experiences in prayer. It is more through ordinary events, favourable and unfavourable, that she sees the will of Christ and the opposition of the devil manifesting themselves. Banez was a renowned theologian of grace and we can perhaps see his influence in the way Teresa talks about the relationship of body and soul, of temporal and spiritual. The soul can do nothing, she says, except abide by the laws of the body and all its needs and changes (Foundations 29.2). She is not sure whether her advice about prioresses is ‘spiritual or temporal’ but it does not matter since what concerns her is the way temporal matters affect spiritual good (Visitation 2 and 10). Love is not seen if it is kept hidden in corners, she writes, but love is seen ‘in the midst of the occasions of falling’ (Foundations 5.15). Rules and regulations are necessary in the same way that houses are, to shelter the work going on inside them. Constitutions should be agreed on quickly so that people can get on with living, and she found the protracted disagreements among the friars tedious.

On John of the Cross’s more austere spirituality she says that ‘seeking God would be very costly if we could not do so until we were dead to the world’. ‘God deliver me’, she says, ‘from people so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, no matter what’. Nevertheless we should be grateful to John of the Cross, she says about one piece of his writing, ‘for having explained so well what we did not ask’ (Satirical Critique 6-7). Perhaps she was a little jealous of little John!

Teresa of Avila remains an inspiration and a trustworthy guide for all who try to persevere in prayer. She is a Doctor of the Church of whom the liturgy says that God inspires us by her holy life, instructs us by her preaching, and gives us His protection in answer to her prayers. I have offered some thoughts here about her conversion, about her understanding of the Christian way as one of shared friendship and love, and about her freedom and energy in the service of Christ and the Church. One of her own poems has become well known and is a fitting, if familiar, conclusion:

Nada te turbe,                        Let nothing trouble you,

nada te espante,                    Let nothing scare you,

todo se pasa,                         All is fleeting,

Dios no se muda.                  God alone is unchanging.

La paciencia                         Patience

todo lo alcanza,                    Everything obtains.

quien a Dios tiene                Who possesses God

nada le falta:                        Nothing wants.

solo Dios basta.                   God alone suffices.

Listen here to this poem as it is sung at Taizé

Week 28 Monday (Year 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 28 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Wisdom 7:7-11; Psalm 89/90; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30

'What is to be adored?' It is another way of putting the man's question. What good is there to which I can give myself fully so as to inherit eternal life? What good is proportionate to such an inheritance?

Jesus' first response is to say, 'well nothing in this world'. There is no such good except in God.

But God has given us the way by which we can journey towards Him - he has shared His Wisdom (first reading), given us His Word (second reading), He has sent His Son (gospel reading).

'You know the wisdom God has taught you already', is Jesus' second response. It is in the commandments. This is the natural law, more or less known to all human beings: do not kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or lie, or defraud, and honour your parents.

'I've been following this way', the man says, 'all my life'. Jesus looked at him and loved him. In this the most profound reality is revealed: in heriting eternal life is not something we guarantee for ourselves by our actions or our dispositions. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. This knowledge in us follows on our being known by God, being regarded by Him, being loved by Him.

So in his third and final response to the man Jesus says, in effect, 'you inherit eternal life by becoming like me because in doing that you begin to live the life of God'. Give all you have to the poor and follow me. This complete detachment opens us to transcendence, to God, to the only good worthy of our adoration. We move into this detachment by giving all we have to the poor as God has given to us all that He has - His eternally begotten and only Son.

The disciples then join the conversation. 'You are saying it is impossible', because we are all rich, perhaps not in money but in other ways - power, influence, esteem, intelligence, knowledge, etc. How would we ever be able to give it all away to the poor so as to follow Jesus in such total freedom and detachment?

It is impossible, Jesus agrees. The disproportion is too great between what you need to do and what you can do. But everything is possible for God. It is God's gaze, God's love, God's knowledge of us that opens us to the possibility of eternal life. God being among us in His Son: this is the good thing that makes it possible for us to inherit eternal life.

We are called to walk on the water towards Him, on the path of faith, with trust and hope, opening ourselves to a goodness beyond our imagination. The poor are always with us, reminding us of this teaching and calling us to an ever deeper following of Christ.

Week 27 Saturday (Year 2)

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

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

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

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

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