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.

Week 32 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 13:1-9; Ps 19; Luke 17:26-37

On the face of it, the instruction of Jesus that we should ‘remember Lot’s wife’ (Luke 17.32) is a bit strange. ‘Do not forget the one who was turned to salt because she could not forget’, is what he seems to be saying to us. Keep in mind this woman who suffered because she was keeping something in mind, turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back.

Although it is found in that section of Luke that is most distinctive (Luke 9.51-18.14), the passage in Luke 17 in which Jesus refers to Lot’s wife has a parallel in Matthew 24. Both texts speak about the coming of the Son of Man and the events associated with it. Both refer to the days of Noah when people ate, and drank, and married until suddenly the flood came and destroyed them all (Luke 17.27; Matthew 24.37-39). The warning is given in apocalyptic terms: life will go on pretty much as normal until suddenly the end comes.

Luke adds a further Old Testament reference. ‘Just as it was in the days of Lot’, he says, ‘they ate, drank, bought, sold, planted and built. But on the day Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulphur destroyed them all and so it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed’ (Luke 17.28-30). The message is the same as that drawn from the reference to Noah: life will go on pretty much as normal until suddenly the end comes.

On that day, Jesus continues in Luke 17.31, people will be on the housetop or in the field. They are not to re-enter the house or turn back. This instruction is mentioned elsewhere in Luke (21.21) and also in Matthew 24.17-18 and Mark 13.15. The immediately succeeding verse, however – ‘Remember Lot’s wife’ (Luke 17.32) – is unique to Luke who then strengthens the general warning by citing two sayings familiar from elsewhere in the gospels. The first of these is that ‘whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it but whoever loses his life will preserve it’ (Luke 17.33; Matthew 16.25; John 12.25). The second is ‘there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left … there will be two women grinding meal together, one will be taken and the other left’ (Luke 17.34; Matthew 24.40).

This is the only reference to Lot in the gospels and there is only one other reference to him in the New Testament (2 Peter 2.7). It is easy to see why Lot’s wife comes to mind in a text warning that the appearing of the Son of Man will be as unexpected, for most people, as was Noah’s flood or the destruction of Sodom. The instruction to leave what you are at and not turn back brings Lot’s wife immediately to mind.

The other New Testament reference to Lot is also an apocalyptic text, a warning about wrath and judgement to come (2 Peter 2.7). God, we are told, is quite capable of sifting and picking out the few or solitary righteous ones from a mass of sinners. We know this from the stories of Noah and Lot (2 Peter 2.4-10).

Lot’s wife is to be remembered as one who looked back to, and was held by, what she was being asked to leave behind. It paralysed her and meant that she missed the moment. This is how preachers have often used Lot’s wife and the warning of Jesus to remember her. A certain kind of attachment makes it impossible for us to enter the kingdom. We must be alert, watchful, detached, ready to go out to meet the Son of Man when he comes.

Jesus had already made the point earlier in the gospel of Luke when he said that ‘no one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven’ (Luke 9.62). According to Jeremiah 46.5, warriors fleeing in terror do not look back, and there are other Old Testament texts which speak about ‘not looking back’ in situations of fear, terror and threat (Exodus 14.10; Joshua 8.20; Judges 20.40; 1 Samuel 24.8; 2 Samuel 1.7; 2.20).

Luke 17.20-37 contains elements that are found elsewhere but combined with elements that are not, and in an order that is distinctive, it gives us a unique teaching about apocalyptic and vocation. For example, although Luke 17.31 and 17.33 are found elsewhere in the New Testament, they are never linked in the way that they are here and it is the instruction to remember Lot’s wife that provides the link. The saying of Luke 17.33 about losing one’s life and gaining it is a very familiar saying of Jesus but nowhere in the New Testament, perhaps, is its radical requirement so clear as it is here, illustrated by the case of Lot’s wife.

Week 32 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 7:22-8:1; Psalm 119; Luke 17:20-25

We find intimations of the Blessed Trinity throughout the books of the Old Testament. The Lord, the God of Israel, is revealed in His wisdom and in His spirit. At times it is a question of Wisdom and Spirit, with capital letters, personifications of qualities or characteristics of God that refer to different aspects of God's presence in creation and of creation's relationship to God. And at times these aspects are spoken of in 'personal' terms, in terms of awareness, responsiveness, and action.

Today's first reading is a remarkable hymn to Wisdom, a litany of her qualities and activities within creation. But at times it might be regarded also as a hymn to the Spirit of God. In fact it opens by telling us that 'in wisdom is a spirit, intelligent, holy, etc', and wisdom is 'a spirit that pervades all spirits'. Mobile beyond all motion wisdom penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity. While renewing all things - a work of the Spirit according to other texts of the Bible - Wisdom herself remains.

Who says that the Hebrews were not as well able for philosophy as the Greeks! Who says that the 'primitive' peoples of the ancient world were not as capable of sophisticated thought about theology as modern people consider themselves to be! Here is an effort to describe the divine presence in creation. God is not one of the things within the creation but stands before all of them. God is not an aspect or power or element or force within the creation but stands beneath all aspects, all powers, all elements, all forces. God is not finding himself in creation but stretches from end to end of it: in other words is its goal as much as he is its source. But this is not to push God out of the creation, to say that God has no place in it just because he is not part of it. It is to say rather that while God is transcendent of the creation, above and beyond it (obviously not in any spatial sense: this would be to pull God back into the universe and place him somewhere), God is also immanent, the deepest reality at the heart of all things.

The Bible adds a personalisation of the Divine Wisdom to what theologically minded philosophers already saw. This refers not just to those biblical texts where God's Wisdom is spoken of as a woman who invites her clients to come, be wise, learn from her, eat her bread and drink her wine. It refers also to the ways in which the Divine Wisdom comes to dwell in holy souls, lives and works in them, dwells in human persons to produce friends of God and prophets. It refers to the ways in which God dwelt in Abraham and Moses, in David and Isaiah - the Word or Wisdom of God placed in them by God's Spirit who thus spoke through these prophets.

Christians reading through these texts see a wonderful build up to what is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Here is one who is more than a friend of God or a prophet. Here is the one who is the Messiah. More than that, here is the one in whom the Spirit of God is at work in a unique way, one who is himself the Wisdom or Word of God. The end of today's first reading tells us that wisdom takes precedence over light, for light is conquered by darkness whereas wickedness cannot prevail over wisdom: this re-appears in the prologue of Saint John's gospel which tells of the Incarnation of the Word of God - the light who has come into the world, through whom all things were made, the life of human beings, a light that the darkness cannot overcome.

'Wisdom reaches from end to end mightily and governs all things well'. It is the only biblical text quoted in the famous work of Boethius On the Consolation of Philosophy. Wisdom governs all things well and reaches from end to end.

Today's gospel reading fits perfectly with this. The kingdom of God (God's presence and power) is not here or there but is present among us. It cannot be identified with this or that because it is in and through all things. The revelation of that kingdom in the presence and the return of Christ fulfills what is spoken of in the text from Wisdom. 'Just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.'

Here is the final personification of the Wisdom of God, revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. But - strangest mystery of all - he is destined first to suffer greatly and be rejected. In the wise foolishness of God Jesus stretches his arms on the cross, from one side to the other, governing all things sweetly from that master's chair, carrying us beyond anything revealed before then about God's Wisdom and Love. All philosophy is contained there, all our understanding and knowledge of God. It is why Edith Stein wrote about the knowledge that comes only through the cross. It is why Thomas Aquinas says that he learned everything, all his philosophy and theology, from his contemplation of Christ crucified.

Week 32 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 6:1-11; Psalm 82; Luke 17:11-19

Jesus travels along a borderline, between Galilee and Samaria, on his way to Jerusalem. He encounters a group of people obliged to live permanently on a borderline, a group of ten lepers. Lepers were required to live outside, though it is clear that there were moments when they came close to healthy people and healthy people came close to them. It must have been a tense, anxious kind of existence. How was traffic across this social border to be regulated?

They cry out to Jesus as other lepers do, as well as countless people who come to Jesus looking for healing. All ten are physically healed, the gospel tells us, but it seems that only one is spiritually healed. Only one came back to give thanks. To be capable of gratitude is to be graced in a more profound way. It means recognising the giftedness of what we have and are. More importantly it means acknowledging the giver of all gifts that come from the kindness and generous love of God our Saviour.

It is an important transition in the spiritual life when people come to focus on the giver of the gifts rather than on the gifts that the giver gives. It is another borderline along which we find ourselves travelling: thinking of ourselves and our needs, thinking of the other and his gifts. The capacity for gratitude means freedom to receive, to be indebted, to be dependent, and to acknowledge the bonds that hold us across all kinds of borders.

The freedom to receive is also the source of the freedom to give. In receiving graciously we not only learn to give thanks, we also find the confidence and the power to give, to share what we have and are (because we are continually receiving what we have and are).

'What's the magic word?', parents say to children when teaching them to be grateful. 'What are the saving words?', we might say. They are kindness and generous love, mercy and renewal richly poured out, grace and eternal life, from the Father's Son, in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Week 32 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 2:23-3:9; Psalm 33(34); Luke 17:7-10

It's complicated. Not because of that little parable itself, but because just a few weeks ago we heard another parable about a master and a slave that seemed to say the exact opposite. The first parable is found in Luke 12 and tells of a master who returns and finds his servant awake, doing what he should be doing, which is watching for the master's return. The master seats the servant at the table and, reversing roles, serves him. Here, in Luke 17, this is not the case. The servant should expect nothing more from his master than to be treated as a servant should be treated: to serve the master and then sit down to eat. “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.”

How do we put these together? Because the life of faith and prayer, the life of friendship and love, is a life that needs attention day after day. It is not something that is established once and for all, forever. Our appreciation of these gifts - of faith and prayer, of friendship and love - has a history. There is a dynamism, a journey, a development, as these realities continue day by day and face the changing demands and challenges of each day. Sometimes our need to maintain a clear sense of what we have received will be threatened from one direction, sometimes from another. These different parables are a way of keeping us on the right track, of ensuring that we remain steadfast in receiving these gifts and living them out.

There can be a subtle shift in statements such as “he is my Lord”, “she is my friend”, “he is our God”. If we emphasise the noun, then everything seems fine: Lord, friend, God. These are realities to be celebrated and honoured, and for which we give thanks every day. But if we begin to emphasise the possessive pronoun—my Lord, my friend, our God—then a not-so-subtle change occurs, and we have transformed the gift into something it is not.

We always need to remember loud and clear the grace of the gift, which is totally free, undeserved, beyond our imagination. ‘Love welcomed me,’ says George Herbert, insisting that I sit at his table, and ‘so I sat and ate.’ We always need to remember strongly and clearly that transforming this gift into a kind of possession, into a kind of currency of exchange between me and God, or between me and my friend, will mean losing precisely what makes it so wonderful: its gratuitousness, its undeservedness, its freedom.

As always, when faced with perplexities in interpreting the Gospels, it is useful to apply this parable to the Servant of servants, to put it in a Christological key. How would it read if the servant/slave in question were thought of as Jesus? Then (putting the two parables together) we can imagine the Father welcoming the Son to the eternal banquet and saying to him: ‘Come, sit down and eat, and I will serve you.’ And we can imagine the Son, arriving in the presence of the Father, saying: ‘I am a useless servant, I have only done what I was asked to do.’

This ‘uselessness’ is the point of faith and prayer, of love and friendship. It is what gives them their wonderful character. To commercialise these things or use them in some other utilitarian way is to destroy them. We therefore live between the need to be certain that we are loved totally and freely and the need to be certain that the One who loves us remains completely free in doing so. For otherwise, how could it be the gift we need? And for this divine gift, we thank God deeply every day.

Week 32 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 1:1-7; Psalm 139; Luke 17:1-6

You will find here a talk that might be helpful 

in thinking about today's gospel reading.