Week 29 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 5:12-21 ; Psalm 40; Luke 12:35-38

There are a number of places in the New Testament where the most significant teaching hangs on the simplest words, often on prepositions. John's gospel gives us more than one example of this ('as ... so ...') and so too does the Letter to the Colossians ('all things through ... for ... in ... him'). Today's first reading is another example. 'As' the first Adam through his disobedience stands at the head of a history of loss and alienation, 'so' the second or last Adam through his obedience stands at the head of a history of redemption and restoration.

But it would be a mistake to think that the analogy or proportion implied by the 'as ... so' means equivalence or equality between the two. As if the two Adams stood at the head of two opposing but equal consequences. As if the second or last Adam simply undid what was brought about by the first. As is the case with many analogies, the difference here is greater than the similarity. Perhaps it is yet another consequence of sin, and the self-centredness that it brings, that we find this difficult to understand and to accept. We think that Christ's work is measured by our sin. We can even end up understanding Christ in terms of the first Adam - as the solution to our problem, as the answer to our question - rather than the other way round - as a new creation, an adoption as sons, the gift of an eternal life that radically heals, strengthens, and transforms the old man .

As if salvation history were centred on Adam, the 'old man', and his needs, rather than on Christ, the 'new man', and the love that He is. Two other simple words bring home the radical disproportion between the world of Adam and the world of Christ: 'much more', Paul says, and he says it over and over again here. 'Much more' does grace, and the gracious gift of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, overflow, bathing humanity in the new freedom, the new life, brought by Christ. If death comes to reign because of sin, 'much more' will we come to reign in life through Christ. 'Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more': grace will never be outdone and never eclipsed, the light will never be comprehended by the darkness, hatred will never understand love, death has no ability to threaten eternal life.

This disproportion between our sin and God's grace is shocking, and it ought to be so. This shock is described in today's gospel reading. The faithful servants, who will later say 'we are only servants, we have only done our duty', are here the objects of a divine grace: the master, far from asking them to see to his needs when he arrives home, makes them sit at table and he himself serves them. It is a reversal of the natural order, a revolution of the kingdom of grace, the kind of shocking initiative we associate with Love.

Once again George Herbert helps us to meditate on this theology of grace. One of his poems, called simply 'Love', begins like this:

"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin".

And after an exchange between the soul and Love, in which the soul sees the disproportion between its need and Love's desire - I am a sinner, at best a servant - the poem concludes like this:

"'You must sit down', says Love, 'and taste my meat'. / So I did sit and eat."

Week 29 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 4:20-25; Luke 1:69-75; Luke 12:13-21

Most homilies and sermons are quickly forgotten, a few stay in the memory always. There are some stories and jokes one hears that hang around, illustrations and analogies that the good preacher or teacher will use to impress something crucial on the mind of his listeners. One such in my case is a comment by the Irish Dominican, Donagh O'Shea, speaking about the difference between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. It is the same river that flows into both bodies of water but one is dead whereas the other is living. The difference is that the waters of the Jordan flow through the Sea of Galilee, in at one side and out at the other, whereas when they run into the Dead Sea that is where they end: there is no outflow, the water evaporates, the salt increases, and the sea is dead. The sea that allows the water to flow through it is alive with many creatures and its waters are healthy. The sea that holds on to what it receives is dead.

It comes to mind thinking about today's gospel reading, in particular the comment of Jesus that 'one's life does not consist of possessions'. The foolish man who thinks he can store everything up for happy years to come has decided to stop living: 'this night your life will be demanded of you'. Clearly it means that he dies before he has a chance to benefit from what he has stored up. But it can also have another meaning, that in deciding to find his life in what he possesses, he kills his life. There is no longer a flowing in and a flowing out, no longer the exchange and commerce of life's activities, no longer the relationships that characterise any real living. Even if he were to continue to live physically, in every other way he would be dead.

In this he becomes like the rich man in the parable of Luke 16: turned in on himself and blind to what is around him. But to be 'rich in what matters to God' is to be rich in the way that God is rich, which means rich in generosity, rich in grace. Jesus speaks of this soon after telling this parable (Luke 12:32-34). The Father's good pleasure, he says, is to give you the kingdom (12:32). The purse that does not grow old is the purse that gives as well as receives, a purse whose owner thinks of others and not just of himself (12:33-34). And if we are to be alive as the heavenly Father is alive, then we will be alert and responsive to all that is happening around us, to everyone who crosses our path, to all that comes our way. 'Be merciful as your Father is merciful', Jesus teaches in Luke 6:36, and the Father is kind also to the ungrateful and the selfish.

The credit side of our account, Paul says in the first reading, consists in having faith in God that is something like the faith shown by Abraham. This requires a very different kind of calculation whose key principle is to believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. Those who have received this gift establish their life not on what they possess but on the power of God who, as Paul says earlier in Romans 4, gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Like the Sea of Galilee, those who believe are alive ('the righteous man lives through faith', Romans 1:17). The person of faith is ready to give and to share because they trust that the heavenly Father will give them whatever they need. They are ready to let go and to venture forth. They are ready to turn around and to try again. They are ready to listen and to consider. They have nothing but they receive everything. In the words of the prayer of Saint Francis, they become channels, rich in the gifts of God which they hand on, pass around, and share with others.

Week 29 Sunday (Year C)

Readings: Exodus 17:8-13; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; 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. 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 dress 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. 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 read elsewhere 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.

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. Moses in the first reading is thus a model for her perseverance, the need to work hard to sustain faith and hope in situations of distress.

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.

You will find here another homily on today's gospel reading

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.

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 1)

Readings: Romans 1:1-7; Psalm 98; Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? We might be tempted to think that the answer is obvious: Jonah's three days in the belly of the whale and his deliverance therefrom is the sign.

But 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 greater here 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 are easily 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 for Luke it is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people that constitutes the sign. 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 and we need to think again about the sign 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 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.

We can add to this today the sign of Paul, seen in the first reading from his letter to the Romans. He has received the grace of apostleship and lives now in the obedience of faith. His famous conversion was in response to God turning towards him as God turned towards the Ninevites. This is what is asked of Jonah: be converted to God's way of caring for His people. It is what is asked also of us: treasure the sign of Jonah, that God is always ready to embrace in mercy and love those who turn to Him.

Week 27 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings: Malachi 3.13-20b; Psalm 1; Luke 11.5-13

We have been reading the works of the 'minor' prophets at Mass these past couple of weeks. Today it is the turn of Malachi, the text which concludes the Christian Old Testament.

The 'Day of the Lord' will be a day of fire, he tells us, a fire issuing from the Sun of Justice. That fire will be experienced by each one according to how they have disposed themselves. For those who have lived well, it will bring healing. For those who have not live well, it will bring dissolution. To live well means fearing the Lord and trusting in his name. Not to live well means, the opposite, fearing neither God nor man, disdaining justice and denying truth.

Jesus continues to call the disciples to prayer, arguing that just as people will respond to the persistent knocking of a friend, how much more and how much more readily will the heavenly Father respond to those who approach him. Not only that, but the Fahter has a particular gift in mind for them. It seems that whatever we ask, the Father will give us the Holy Spirit in response to our asking. To ask at all is already a sign of the Spirit working in us. We do not know how to pray as we ought, St Paul says, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

This gift of the Spirit - God's love poured into our hearts - is also what makes it possible for us to fear and to trust God. It turns us towards God in hope and it turns God towards us, if we can put it like that. 'They shall be mine', God says through Malachi, 'children whom I love, my own special possession.'