Week 31 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Philippians 2:12-18; Ps 26; Luke 14:25-33

Preachers and translators pull back from the word 'hate' in today's gospel reading. It is sometimes rendered 'prefer to me' or 'more than me'. But Jesus as recorded by St Luke is more radical and uncompromising on this necessary detachment if people are to follow him, than he is on the dangers of riches. In fact they are two aspects of the same thing. In spite of the tenderness and compassion of Jesus as we get to know him in Luke's gospel, there are these radical warnings as well, about riches, and about the need to hate even your own life if you want to follow him.

Jesus is not a purveyor of middle class values although he has sometimes been turned into that. He is not here to endorse the world as it is understood by those who are following him. He is strange and different. His call is not to us to find a place for him in our world - fit him in somehow alongside the other relationships and activities in which we are involved. His call is to us to follow him into his world where he has found a place for us. The call is not to squeeze him and his message into our world and what is acceptable to it - although, again, this is often what has been done. He calls us to follow him into his strange, new world.

Luke's gospel is the gospel of great reversals: hate those you are inclined to love; love those you are inclined to hate; first last, last first; humble exalted, exalted humbled; rich man and Lazarus; Pharisee and publican; elder brother and prodigal son. How can one be his disciple, then? It seems too difficult, too paradoxical, even a bit weird. How is one to anticipate the cost of following him, as the man does who wants to build a tower? How prepare sensibly to follow him, as the man does who decides to go out to battle? What he teaches us about the tower-builder and the war-maker is that they make preparations that are 'only sensible' if that is the kind of thing they want to do. In the case of following Jesus, what is 'only sensible' if we are preparing to follow him? Here is what you must do, he says: renoucne all you have, bear your own cross, hate what you are inclined to love, even your own life.

One thing is very clear here, in chapter 14 of St Luke's gospel. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to suffer and to die. He is to be rejected by our world which cannot find a place for him, which finds his message too strange, too difficult, too puzzling. There are still 'great crowds' following him but this is not going to continue for much longer. We will spit him out. But that spitting out of Jesus by the world opens the way for the greatest reversal of all, the resurrection. Things are well and truly broken open, the world is turned upside down and inside out.

We are called to follow him into that mystery of the Great Reversal, the mystery of his death and resurrection. In being baptised, declaring ourselves Christian, we have taken it as the pattern of our lives, the criterion by which we will evaluate everything about ourselves, our experiences, our intentions, our motives, our relationships, our actions. Participating in the Eucharist means allowing this mystery of the Great Reversal to enter more deeply into us, tasting already (along with our fathers and mothers, wives and children, brothers and sisters, who share our faith) the gifts of the new world that is coming.

Inevitably we domesticate Jesus, turning him into a harmless pupply, a moralist at our disposal. Just as we domesticate God. His talk of hatred in today's gospel serves then to keep us awake, alert, uncertain, watching out for our God who is wild and free, ever new and creative in His infinite Love.

Week 31 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Psalm 17; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28-34

Some years ago an English actor did the round of theatres in Britain and Ireland with a one-man show. He simply spoke the King James version of St Mark's Gospel from beginning to end. As an actor, an interpreter of scripts, he brought out all kinds of subtleties and shades of colour that our normal public reading of scripture never captures. Where most liturgical reading is solemn and a bit monotonous, he illuminated the story in a remarkable way bringing out the humour, anger, irony, sarcasm, gentleness, poignancy, bitterness, and many other things that lie hidden in the text. It was a stunning performance.

So what about today's gospel reading from Mark, what moods or shades of colour might be found in it? The scribe seems a bit patronising or perhaps he is simply naive. Is he condescending? His repetition of Jesus' summary of the law adds to it and changes it in subtle ways: is he correcting the amateur rabbi from Galilee? Is there a barb in Jesus' answer - you are not far from the kingdom of God - effectively telling him that he has hit the nail on the side? Is this what the scribe is saying to Jesus, you got it almost exactly right? Is it what Jesus is saying to the scribe? How near is 'not far'?

The answer to that question depends on what we are talking about. Augustine in his Confessions tells about a moment when he was not far from the kingdom of God. His spiritual condition was like a man who from a wooded summit can glimpse the homeland of peace for which he has long searched, he has it now in his sights, but there is still the question of how to get into that kingdom from where he is. What will carry us across, bridge the gap, when a person is not far from the kingdom of God? For Augustine it is the cross of Christ by clinging to which he makes the journey from his viewing point, home to the kingdom. Charity is established in the humility of Christ, he says. If we want to live by the great commandment we must embrace the humility of Christ, his cross. Catherine of Siena speaks similarly about Christ as the bridge that carries us to the kingdom. There is a hostel at the bridge which is the Church where the Eucharist, Christ himself, is baked and offered to us as our food for the journey. The divinity is kneaded into the clay of our humanity.

We find a scriptural basis for such thoughts in the Letter to the Hebrews which we have been reading recently at Sunday Mass. It speaks of Jesus as our high priest who has opened the way for us by his sacrifice. He came into our flesh and in offering that flesh taken from us he enters the heavenly sanctuary carrying not the blood of animals but his own blood. There he eternally makes intercession for us. Trailing behind him is the way he has opened, the road to the throne of grace and mercy, the bridge, the cross, the Eucharist, the Church.

'Beautiful' is how we might translate the scribe's comment to Jesus when he summarises the great commandment: 'you are right'. Jesus sees that the scribe's answer is wise, intelligent. So perhaps there is more understanding between them than might seem at first. Love opens up the space in which the other can be, and can flourish. It begins with the understanding a person already has and invites him or her to embrace that understanding more fully, to test its depths, to see where its truth leads.

Of course another meaning of 'not far' is that it refers to the scribe's physical proximity to Jesus himself. In John's gospel the great commandment takes the form 'love one another as I have loved you'. The content of the new commandment is not a written law, not even a sacred and hallowed piece of scripture. Most of us can easily quote the text and tell others what the great commandment is . But its content is Jesus Christ, the one who has fulfilled the law in every detail. He loves the Father with all his heart, soul, mind, strength, and he loves his neighbour as himself. He shows us what these things involve but, more than that, he is the only teacher who can enable us to carry it out.

All Souls -- 2 November

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

 

There is a tendency these days to sentimentalise death, to act and speak as if it were no big thing, just a ‘passing on’ or a ‘passing away’, a move into ‘the next room’ or an easy translation to ‘a better place’. There is often much laughter, especially at Irish funerals, teasing one another about what the dead person might be doing or thinking, having a pint of Guinness or watching the Cheltenham Gold Cup, for example.

All this is a way of comforting one another in difficult times. But it might also be a way of denying the full reality of what has happened. Popular films sometimes do this by having the ‘spirit’ of a person hovering over the places where they lived and telling us the story of the days and weeks that preceded their ‘passing’. As if they had not really died.

Some might think it a Christian thing to think about death in these terms, to speak of death as no big deal. Is it not one of the main beliefs of Christianity, our belief in an 'afterlife'? Is it not the high point of the comfort that religion is supposed to offer, this confidence about what happens after death?

In one sense death is a natural end to the life of the human animal and can be, very often, a happy release. But in another sense death is an unnatural experience because we are spiritual creatures who already sense something of eternity in ourselves. Our experiences of knowledge and love have something of the eternal about them, as philosophers and poets have often seen, and recounted. Death is an insult to something we sense about ourselves, an affront and a scandal.

And many people cannot enter into the levity, the false comfort, because they find the absence of someone they have loved unbearably sad. There is a terrible poignancy in being reminded of them, realising they are not in their accustomed place. Widowed men and women, orphaned children, bereaved parents, often have to bear privately the intense pain of feeling that a part of their own bodies has been taken away, a gap has been opened that can never again be filled, a wound has been inflicted for which there is no healing. They don’t want to go on and on about it ... and people wonder why they are not getting over it.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is a statement about God more than about ourselves or about stages of human existence. This is because faith, as Christians understand it, always has God as its direct concern. This is one reason for calling it a theological virtue. It means that whatever falls within the reach of faith does so only because it has something to do with God, it teaches us something about God.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is an aspect of faith in God the Holy Spirit, whom in the Creed we call 'the Lord, the giver of life’. The Latin term is beautiful: the Spirit is vivificantem, the vivifier. The God in whom we believe is Creator and Lord of all things, God of the living and not of the dead. The God in whom we believe wants life not death. God causes the wilderness to blossom and the barren womb to bear fruit.

The God in whom we believe is the Father who raised his Son Jesus from the dead and exalted Him in the Spirit to his own right hand. The Father allowed his only Son to enter the kingdom of the dead, to dwell amongst the dead and to rise from there. ‘I was dead’, Christ says, ‘but now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of hell’.

Our faith and hope are about God, what God is like, where God is in human experience, who it is God has promised to be for His people. For those who believe in God, the awful journey into loss, decline, and death is one Jesus has travelled before us, one through which we travel with Jesus, one from which all who belong to Jesus will be raised, as he was, by the power of God.

Our faith is not in an 'afterlife' but rather in the 'future life', 'the life of the world to come' as we say in the creed. It is not just a continuation of what we experience now but rather a new life which we might glimpse already from time to time, in our experiences of love particularly, but whose full reality we cannot imagine.

 

Rather than turning death into ‘no big thing’, Christian faith in the resurrection of the body enables us to face death in all its reality and sadness. Rather than pretending that death is not terrible and sad, Christian hope in the resurrection of the body looks that horror and sadness squarely in the face. Our faith and our hope is that God, who is with us in dying, rescues us from the kingdom of the dead to bring us into his own eternal life.

To believe in the resurrection of the body, then, is to believe something about God. It is to affirm that God is the God of life. It is also to say something about the reach of our hope. Founded on God's power, and on what God has already done in raising Jesus from death, our hope stretches ‘from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven’.

All Saints -- 1 November

Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; Psalm 24; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

People are still unsettled by the gaps in the year: the move from winter into spring, new year, mid-summer, mid-winter. Where the seasons change not only can we expect colds and small ailments but other uncertainties also. What about darkness, storms and snow? Are we prepared for the time ahead? Many customs survive that mark the crossing of these gaps and the negotiation of these uncertainties. The gaps need to be filled, the bridges crossed, one part of the year linked with the next, perhaps spirits need placating. In the face of such moments of fear and threat, people often cope by making lots of noise, lighting fires, and dressing up, mimicking the spirits to frighten them off before they can frighten us.

Halloween takes us from autumn into winter, and continues to gather many such rituals to itself. The fact that in the northern hemisphere we are moving from light into darkness makes this transition more frightening than most. In the Christian calendar we celebrate All Saints and All Souls on the first two days of November. The saints are the men and women who stand in the gaps of the year, who fill gaps, build bridges, keep things going. When I was a novice I remember a prior thanking a departing brother for 'filling a gap'. It seems there was not much to say about his preaching or the other things he was involved in, his great contribution had been to fill a gap. It did not seem much at the time and was even amusing since the departing brother was quite portly. But perhaps filling a gap is a more profound, more important role than it seems at first.

Christ is the one who fills the most threatening of gaps. A new Moses, he stands in the breach (Ps 106:23; Amos 7:7) that alienates human beings most fundamentally from God. He is the just one who stands in the gap on behalf of the people (Ezekiel 22:30; 13:5), the mediator who negotiates on their behalf, the one who secures the wall of the city. Crucified on a hill just outside the city wall, his body points in every direction. He is the still point of the turning world, the rejected stone that has become the foundation stone, the one who enters into the deepest darkness of the great gap of death and causes light to shine there. He stands at the gate, a crucified hero, saviour of his people, the breach-mender.

At All Saints we celebrate all those people, especially the ones who have not become famous, who have filled gaps with the love of Christ. We all know two, or five, or eight such people, not known perhaps to any other of our friends. So already that is a lot of good people who in small, ordinary, but very important ways have done this: by helping the poor, teaching the ignorant, comforting the sorrowful, helping sinners to be reconciled, encouraging the downcast, forgiving injuries, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and so on. These are all significant gaps which are filled by friendship and love. The saints are those who bring hope where there is despair, light where there is darkness, pardon where there is injury, and love where there is hatred.

The saints are those marked with the sign of the cross, the sign of the just man standing in the gap. They are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart, hungering and thirsting for justice. They weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, They show mercy and they make peace. Understood in these ways there is nothing better that we can say about those who have gone before us: the good and holy people we have known filled gaps, and filled them with faith and hope and love.

Week 30 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Jeremiah 31:7-9; Ps 125; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

I got quite a shock preparing a homily for this Sunday when we were reading Mark's gospel some years ago. At the beginning of the gospel reading we are told that Bartimaeus is 'beside the way' whereas at the end we are told he is 'on the way'. It brought to mind the difference between bystanders or spectators who are beside the way, and agents and participants who are on the way. (Although poor Bartimaeus is neither literally a bystander, since he is sitting, nor a spectator, since he is blind.)

A good friend whom I had known for twenty five years worked on the theme of the bystander, taking his cue from Thomas Merton's book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. This friend was Breifne Walker, an Irish Spiritan priest, who lectured in moral theology in Ghana, Ireland and Nigeria. Breifne had been working on what he called 'the self-implication of Christian discipleship', that to be a Christian and to stand by when faced with oppression or injustice of any kind, is a contradiction. The Christian bystander is rightly guilty, then, and I wondered if I could make something of this in thinking about Bartimaeus and his being called to discipleship.

I had not seen Breifne for over a year. Looking for his work on the internet, I discovered instead, to my dismay and great sadness, that he had died some months earlier, at the relatively young age of 61. News of his death had not reached me: this was the shock I received while preparing my homily to discover by chance that he had died. I could not then not speak of him when I preached, remembering his quiet but persistent arguing for justice, and his stubborn refusal to stand by and turn a blind eye to injustice no matter how powerful its perpetrators or how complex its causes.

We are told that Bartimaeus is 'the son of Timaeus'. It seems unnecessary and it may simply be the evangelist unpacking the name for his readers. But St Augustine, for one, thought it was significant, and indicated that the blind beggar belonged to a family of some importance so that his present condition represented a great fall in social and economic status. Perhaps his condition is a kind of acted parable for the benefit of James and John. Just a few verses earlier Jesus had said to them what he now says to Bartimaeus, 'what do you want me to do for you?' They get it all wrong as regards glory and being at the side of Jesus. The blind man sees more clearly that what he needs is simply to be with Jesus and to receive his mercy.

In his commentary on this text, St John Chrysostom says that God does not make a promise to blocks of wood. God saves human beings but has chosen not to do that without their conscious and free participation. Hence the dialogue, the conversation, between Jesus and Bartimaeus. Jesus does not presume to tell him what he most deeply wants but instead asks him 'what do you want me to do for you?' In his writing about liberation, Gustavo Gutierrez (who died just a few days ago) says that the poor must be allowed to speak for themselves about their situation. This is to act towards others as God has acted towards us, inviting us to pray to Him telling Him what we need. We may need further education in our desires as James and John do, blinded as they are by a mistaken understanding of power and glory. The blind man's prayer is more enlightened and comes from a place of genuine need: 'that I might receive my sight'.

Clement of Alexandria says that the blind man represents all of us in our condition of spiritual blindness, being brought to faith in Christ so that we see our situation and we see the one who is leading us forward towards the Father's kingdom. The beggar who begins sitting by the way is transformed into a disciple, one who now follows Jesus on the way. My friend Breifne delighted in all this. He devoted his life to thinking and teaching about justice and clear-sightedness, about virtue and discipleship. May he, and Gustavo Gutierrez, rest in peace and become together full participants in the kingdom of their Lord. And may we all be changed from bystanders and spectators into active and courageous followers of Christ.

How can we claim to love God whom we do not see if we fail to love our fellow pilgrims whom we do see?

Week 29 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 2:1-10; Psalm 100; Luke 12:13-21

There are teachings about the dangers of riches that are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. You cannot serve both God and Mammon, for example. So too the image of the camel trying to get through the eye of a needle is found in all three gospels: easier for him to do that than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But today's parable is found only in Luke's gospel. Along with his sensitivity and compassion, indeed because of it, Luke has a particular emphasis on the dangers of riches. He does not qualify the beatitude of the poor as Matthew does, adding the phrase 'in spirit' - happy are you poor is Luke's version, and it is he who adds the woes, beginning with 'woe to you who are rich'. Jesus does not say 'woe to you who are unduly attached to your possessions', or 'woe to you who are not sharing what you have with others'. Just having things is itself problematic.

'None of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions', we read in Luke 14. And Luke 16 is all about this warning against riches. There we find the crafty steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees described as 'lovers of money', and a strange encouragement to the disciples to use money, 'that tainted thing', for the service of the kingdom.

In Luke we find Jesus's teaching about riches at its most radical. This teaching is here made physical, we might say. It is not a question of our attitude to our possessions, it is a problem that comes with having possessions at all. The warning is that human beings inevitably begin to find meaning and security and a sense of identity in their possessions. Rather than just using them, they become us somehow and we become them. We store up treasure of various kinds (not just money) to secure our lives, to give them meaning, and to establish ourselves in a sense of identity: to be someone. If it is by what we have that we become someone, then we have lost ourselves.

Jesus reminds us in today's gospel reading that 'one's life does not consist of possessions'. To act as if it does means to lose one's life. To be genuinely 'rich' means receiving the gift of the kingdom and practising the generosity which is at its heart: letting our possessions flow through us, we might say, not counting them as our own. It is another way of saying that we are to become like Jesus who, though he was rich, became poor, so that we who are poor might become rich.

Week 29 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Psalm 33; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45

The choice of readings heightens the dissonance between what Jesus is trying to teach the disciples and how they are still misunderstanding things. He is the servant of the Lord who gives his life as an offering for sin. He is the Son of Man who came to serve and not to be served. If the second reading offers a title, 'great high priest', that seems to invite glory in a worldly sense, such an interpretation is quickly dispelled: he is our great high priest precisely because he has been tested in every way though he is without sin. Jesus' way is not about becoming a 'great one' who can then 'lord' it over others. It is about a lordship, of course, but of a different kind. The Son of Man came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The notion of 'ransoming' has caused problems in the course of the Church's history: if Jesus gives his life to ransom us, to whom does he give it, why is it required, and what exactly is the ransom? We cannot just ignore the idea since we find the term, or versions of it, meaning either ransoming or redeeming, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, 1 Timothy, Hebrews, and 1 Peter.

The biblical authors, unlike later theologians, focus on the redeemed and the ransomed, the great fact of human liberation achieved by Jesus. He is our redeemer and our ransomer. That liberation is from slavery and exile now understood spiritually in the first place: our alienation from God is overcome. The sacrifice of our great high priest addresses the root-causes of oppression and injustice, it is an offering for sin.

The content of his teaching, the content of the whole New Testament, is not firstly a doctrine or even an example that would remain somehow external to us. The content of his teaching and of the New Testament, the new covenant itself, is Jesus himself, the Son of Man and Son of God who loves the Father simply and completely, and who is obedient to the Father in serving the purposes of God for the salvation of the world.

We do, of course, continue to misunderstand, and will seek to manipulate even the throne of mercy, the grace of God. We translate it back into the language of exchange and power. Much of the drama of the Church's history is its continuing struggle with this misunderstanding. But the Word of God reminds us that we are wanderers in need of teaching and guidance. We are confined in various ways, subject to powers that limit our freedom and distort our understanding. We have been set free for a new life by the one who became our servant, taking on the condition of a slave but becoming the mighty champion who leads us through the heavens.