Week 9 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: 1 Timothy 3:10-17; Psalm 118; Mark 12:35-37

When Christians gather to celebrate their faith the central and most important of those celebrations is the Eucharist, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is the summit of the Christian life, the highpoint of the community's week. It is also the source of that life, because there we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, this extraordinary sacramental gift. And there too we are consecrated as the priest calls down the Holy Spirit first on the bread and wine, that they might become the Body and Blood of Christ, and second on all who share in Christ's Body and Blood, that they might become one body and one spirit in Christ.

But we are also 'consecrated in the truth' during the celebration of the Eucharist because its first part is the 'Liturgy of the Word' in which we are fed on the Word of God in the scriptures. When it has been proclaimed in the readings we hear it explained in the teaching of the homily, we receive it in joy by singing psalms and alleluias, we respond to it by professing our faith in the love song that is the Creed, and by praying for the Church and the world, for all in special need and for the dead. The proclamation of the Word also has a sacramental character - it brings about what it signifies because Christ is really present with us in His Word as it is proclaimed and taught among us.

The readings today focus on this aspect of our life of faith. The short gospel reading shows us Jesus teaching in the Temple, explaining a verse of scripture, and using it to put to the people a provocative question: how can the Messiah be the son of David when David calls him 'Lord'? Why the majority of the people hear this 'with delight' may be a bit puzzling for us. In the context it is Jesus' first chance to put a question of his own after a series of questions addressed to him by various groups - Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees, scribes, lawyers - they have all had a go at him and now he stands on his own ground and puts his own question to the people. Perhaps it was the thought of enemies being put under the feet of the Messiah that delighted the crowd. Or they were simply enjoying the conflict especially now that Jesus, having survived a series of ambushes, was beginning to fight back.

To ask good questions is one of the tools of teaching and Jesus does it here as he often does it elsewhere. In fact his usual way of responding to a question put to him is to ask a better one in response. He also says this: David wrote this verse under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so we are dealing with something true. He is taking his stand on the holy scriptures of Israel's faith. Paul emphasises the same thing in the first reading. Scripture is the foundation of your teaching, he says to Timothy, as it is the foundation of what we know and what we believe. All scripture is inspired by God, Paul says, and so is useful for teaching, for refuting, for guiding people's lives, for teaching holiness. The scriptures carry to us a wisdom that leads to salvation and to know them is to be fully equipped and ready for any good work. But expect opposition too, Paul says, which inevitably comes the way of anybody who tries to live in devotion to Christ.

So we have two short readings but rich in reminding us of the essential source of our faith, the holy scriptures, the Bible. Its authors were inspired by God as they wrote. And all those texts bear witness in some way to Christ, to who he is and to his mission. We have the chance to be fed and watered at this source every Sunday - every day if we wish. Through the Word of God in the scriptures we come to know truth, learn how to live and are shown at what we should aim. Christ is with us each day in his Word, comforting and challenging, illuminating and inspiring, teaching and guiding. How could we not run each day to such a spring, and there drink deeply with delight?

Week 9 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Psalm 24; 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, you are 'not far' from the kingdom? 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. The pride of man - all that gets in the way of our loving God and loving one another - is only undone by the humility of God. The cross is the key that unlocks the door of our pride and opens us to love.

'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 and 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.

So to be 'not far from the kingdom' is to be not far from Jesus. To be living the life of the kingdom is to be living in Him, sharing the same Spirit, the Spirit of God's love which is the only power that enables us to observe the greatest of the commandments.

Week 9 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: 2 Timothy 1:1-3, 6-12; Psalm122 (123); Mark 12:18-22

Arguments against another person's religious beliefs often take the form of trying to make those beliefs appear irrational, absurd and ridiculous. Even if faith is beyond reason, expanding the horizon of reason and giving it new things to think about, believers still want it to be rational. We believe that what seems to us now to be paradoxical and even contradictory will be seen not to be so when the mysteries are finally illuminated for us.

Jesus is on the receiving end of such a criticism in today's gospel, an attempt to show that what he believes is ridiculous. A woman ends up marrying seven brothers in fulfilment of the Law - whose wife will she be in the afterlife? The Sadducees, who put the question, did not believe in the resurrection of the dead - their question aims at showing such belief to be absurd. Other such arguments in the ancient world asked how there would be space for everyone, or who the rightful owners of property would be if it had been occupied and used by different people at different times.

Jesus responds 'in kind' to the Sadducees. He does not do what he normally does in answering questions, shifting the argument to a deeper level of understanding. He simply compounds what they would have regarded as nonsense by speaking not just of resurrection but of angels - the Sadducees did not believe in them either!

But the main point of his response is the second part, where he invites them to think again about God, and how God speaks of himself, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Here they were on shared ground. The Sadducees would have accepted this. 'And you think He is the God of the dead?', Jesus asks, a question which now threatens their faith with absurdity. They cannot say 'yes, he is God of the dead' but saying 'no' implies that the patriarchs are alive in God.

The encounter is unsatisfactory, perhaps the most unsatisfactory in all of the gospels. Nobody comes to believe in Jesus as a result of it, nobody agrees to follow Jesus onto a deeper level of understanding. It serves to remind us that this kind of religious argument is usually sterile, leaving all the participants in exactly the same place as they were at the beginning.

Jesus does make an effort, even if it seems uncharacteristically restrained. He not only counters their argument but invites them to think again - about their understanding of God, about God's power in creation and what it might reach to (invisible realities as well as visible), about the testimony of scripture (he appeals to Exodus, part of the Torah, the only section of the Bible the Sadducees regarded as authoritative) that Israel's Lord is God of the living.

The Sadducees - the high priestly caste, guardians of the Temple system - were at the heart of the opposition to Jesus and were a main target of his criticism of contemporary religious practice. The encounter we read about today is just the opening skirmish in what was to become an ever more violent rejection of Jesus and an ever more vocal, and even violent, critique by him of what the Temple system was doing to Israel's faith. 

The final answer to their skeptical question comes later, with the resurrection of Jesus himself after they had brought about his death. And - horror of horrors! - the fact of his resurrection will be announced to the women by 'a young man dressed in white' (Mark 16:5). He was, it seems, the angel of the resurrection.

Week 9 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: 2 Peter 3:11-15, 17-18; Psalm 89; Mark 12:13-17

Probably the earliest recorded copyright dispute is that involving Colmcille (521-597) and his abbot Finian (c.495-c.589), an argument adjudicated by the high king of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cearball (died c.565). The problem arose because Colmcille decided to copy secretly a psalter belonging to the monastery. Finian was angry that he had not done things in the proper way. What did it matter, Colmcille argued, as long as the Word of God was disseminated and reached as many people as possible? We might hear religious people saying similar things these days when they sit lightly to the rules about copyright.

Diarmait judged in favour of Finian with the famous words 'to every cow its calf, to every book its copy'. Just as the calf belongs to its mother, the copy of a book belongs to the original. The aftermath was terrible, eventually leading to the deaths of many people and the exile of Colmcille to Scotland. But, in God's providence he founded the monastery on Iona which became a spring from which the Christian message spread across Scotland and into northern England.

To every cow its calf, to every book its copy. The image belongs to the original. Jesus says the same in today's gospel. 'Whose image do you find on the coin', he asks. 'Caesar's', they reply. 'So it belongs to Caesar', he says, 'You must therefore give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God'.

This is sometimes interpreted as meaning that the territory of human life is therefore divided up between Caesar and God, between the profane and the sacred, the secular and the religious. But think about it for a moment. If the image of Caesar is found on the coins of the Roman empire, where is the image of God to be found? There is only one answer: the human being is the image of God. And it is not just the human being in part that is God's image, or the human being in some of his activities. It is the human being simply and in her totality that is the image of God and so everything about human life, all aspects and activities, all areas of interest and endeavour, all relationships and commitments - everything that belongs to the image of God, belongs to God.

'Go on growing in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ', we read in today's first reading. There is a sense in which the image of God in us is to be found simply in our created nature, in those gifts that mark us off from the other animals, gifts of intelligence, freedom and creativity. This is how many Christian teachers have spoken about it, seeing the image of God in us in what makes us to be a particular species, homo sapiens.

Two further comments can be made about this.

One is that the image of God, for Thomas Aquinas for example, is found not just in what is specific to us but in what belongs to us comprehensively. So our physical nature, which we share with all animals, also images God because just as the soul is everywhere in the body so God is everywhere in creation. And our sexual nature also images God, because just as man and woman unite in love and bear fruit in the procreation of children so God is creative, in himself, with the generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, as well as bearing fruit in many different ways at all times.

The other comment is, as Augustine for example emphasises, that the image of God in our intellectual faculties is only properly present when those faculties - knowledge, freedom, love, memory, decision - have as their object God himself and the search to know him and to grow in his grace.

So the encouragement in today's first reading - 'go on growing in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and saviour' - is a way of saying 'go on growing into what you are, the image of God by creation, the image of God restored and exalted in redemption, the image of God destined to be transformed in glory on the Day of God when the new heavens and the new earth will mean also the revelation of the new man and woman, the new redeemed and glorified humanity'.

To every cow its calf. To every book its copy. To the Creator and Lord of all things belongs that in which His image is to be found, the human being simply, in her totality, and everything about him and her, without exception. And God is continually strengthening that image in grace, enabling it to grow in knowledge and love.

St Justin Martyr - 1 June

Readings: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Psalm 34; Matthew 5:13-19

'And all who seek you with a sincere heart' is a phrase that has survived into the most recent English translation of the Roman Missal. It is in the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer, where we pray for all who participate in any way in the Eucharist being celebrated, those present, all God's people, and all who seek God 'with a sincere heart'.

Justin the Martyr whose memory we keep today might well be taken as a patron of all who seek with a sincere heart. A pagan philosopher, his quest for truth took him round the various schools of philosophy operating in the ancient world. He found something in each and likewise something lacking in each. So he learned from the Stoics and the Aristotelians, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists. 

 

The truth Justin sought was not just knowledge about the world, how it is put together and how it works. He sought always a moral truth, where the good is to be found and in what does a good human life consist. He also sought a truth that was practical, which enabled its adherents not just to think and to know but to put into practice the truth they had come to see.

 

Eventually he found his way to Christianity and to faith in Christ as the Logos or Eternal Wisdom of God. It was the promise of resurrection, the witness of Christian martyrs, and the longing for the return of Christ, that moved Justin's heart from the philosophical quest to the way of discipleship. He embraced the paradoxical wisdom of the Cross of Jesus, not easy for anybody to 'get their heads around', perhaps more difficult for the philosophically minded than for others.

But this did not lead Justin to reject or to despise what he had learned before. Instead he developed a characteristic understanding of how the Logos, the Eternal Wisdom of God, revealed in creation and in the history of God's dealings with his people, is present in all quests for truth. Sparks of the Word are found everywhere, he said, in all knowledge and science and philosophy. Its fulness, however, is found only in Christ.

 

For Justin it is Jesus who, in his own words, is the light of the world. But, as today's gospel reading reminds us, Jesus said the same thing of those who came to believe in him: 'you are the light of the world'. Justin is a wonderful teacher of this truth and a witness to it also in his death. Just as he had sought wisdom with a sincere heart, always anxious to profess it, to live it, and to celebrate it in the liturgies of the Church, so he was ready to die for it. He was confident that the One in whom he had placed his faith would welcome him into His kingdom of light, love, and life.

 

TRINITY SUNDAY (YEAR A)

Readings: Exodus 34:4b-6,8-9; Daniel 3:52-56; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18

The difficulty of preaching on Trinity Sunday is not that of having to speak about a logical conundrum or a mathematical puzzle, but that of having to speak about a theological mystery whose depths are never exhausted and whose implications are never completely understood. There is too much to say rather than too little. We have come to know more about God than we can manage and so run the risk, in whatever we say, of failing to do justice to some other aspect of the mystery which we ought also to have mentioned.

The gospel passage just read, short as it is, nevertheless presents us with the question in this way: what must we believe about God if we are to take literally two of its statements, the first that God has an only Son whom he gave so that the world might be saved, the second that God has a love for the world which moved Him to give His Son for its salvation. They seem simple and straightforward, these statements. God loved the world and God gave His only Son.

They are so simple and straightforward, so familiar, that their implications can pass us by completely. The theology of the Trinity, developed in the early centuries of Christian history, spells out the implications of these statements, as well as of many other familiar and seemingly straightforward statements throughout the New Testament.

One option is to hear them as metaphors, not intended literally, but meant to teach us something about God that we would express literally in some other way. What 'only Son' means, we might say, is that Jesus is a unique human being, whose spiritual experience, knowledge of God, faith and trust in God, and so on, makes him stand out before all other spiritual teachers and guides. He is so far above the rest of us in this that we can call him, for all practical purposes, 'the only son', the human being who served God best during his earthly life, the one from among us who was most open to God and most filled with God's presence.

This understanding of Jesus was never a serious contender among Christians as a full statement of what it means to call him 'the only Son'. Of course all of it is true when applied to him. We believe him to be that human being most open to God whose love and obedience are the salvation of the world. But the Christian community always believed that there was also something divine about him, believed that he belonged as truly to the side of God as to the side of humanity.

So another view quickly emerged. Perhaps Jesus, while not being quite the same as God - for how could a man be God? - is a visitor from the divine realm who belongs more to that side than to our side. Perhaps from the court of the heavenly Father, where he has a special place, he is sent with a special mission into this world. So he is a divine being, something between God and man, and so very well placed, it might seem, to be the mediator.

But it was clear that this view was not going to be acceptable either. Someone who does not really belong to either place - who is neither truly God nor truly human - is not the kind of mediator who can do what needs to be done. (So some of the Fathers of the Church put it.) The mediator in whom we believe is one who belongs truly and fully to both. This is much more difficult to say, with a number of qualifications and distinctions needing to be made. But they are qualifications and distinctions with which we are all quite familiar for we say them every Sunday at Mass:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven ...

If we want to say, then, that God gave his only Son, so that through him the world might be saved, and that this is not just a nice piece of poetry but is true in its simple and straightforward meaning, then we must begin to speak about the theology of the Trinity.

What moved God to give his only Son, Saint John tells us, is the fact that God loved the world so much. In the First Letter of Saint John it is put even more bluntly: 'God is love', it says. Once again these are simple and straightforward statements and the question is: how literally are we to take them? Is there love in God? If there is only a unitary God, and His creation below Him, then the word 'love' could only be used in some metaphorical sense. Because the distance between creatures and God is infinite, because their difference is infinite, because there can be no equality or mutual dependence between them, the term 'love' could only be used metaphorically of God. Between God and creation there could only be some kind of condescension but not love in the full sense of the word, meaning a relationship between persons that is equal and reciprocal.

But the fact that the Father has an only Son, who is equal in dignity and nature to himself, means that the Father has an equal to love. It means that to say 'God is love' and to say 'God is a trinity of persons' are two ways of saying the same thing. If we want to say, as I am sure we do, that the God we believe in is Love, and we want to understand this literally, then we must begin to speak about the theology of the Trinity. If we want to say, as I am sure we do, that God loves us and has enabled us to love Him in return through adopting us as his sons and daughters in Christ, then we must begin to speak about the Trinity.

Love between persons involves mind and heart, and so the other Advocate of whom Jesus spoke, the Spirit sent on the Church on the day of Pentecost, then easily found His place in this theology of the Trinity. The church came to understand the Holy Spirit as the love which unites the Father and the Son, the bond between them, their embrace. The Spirit too, we believe, is Lord and is the giver of life. He proceeds from the Father and the Son. With them He is worshiped and glorified as God. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe that the life-giving Spirit is at work in the Church, in baptism for the forgiveness of sins, in forming the communion of saints. We believe that the Spirit of love will bring about the resurrection of the dead, for the life he gives is not only the life of this world but also the life of the world to come.

Our simplest and most cherished Christian statements, like John 3:16, 'God so loved the world that he gave his only Son', have led the Church to develop its unique belief in the one God as a Trinity of persons. Far from being an esoteric corner of Christian life and reflection, the Trinity is at the heart of everything we do and are. We are baptized into a Trinitarian faith. We offer the Eucharistic sacrifice to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Our gatherings begin in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In fact, rather than saying that the Trinity is at the heart of everything we do and are, the whole point of today's liturgy is to remind us that everything we do and are is taken up into the heart of the Trinity.

Week 08 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Jude 17, 20b-25; Psalm 63; Mark 11.27-33

In a sermon entitled Puer Iesus ('The boy Jesus'), Thomas Aquinas, preaching to a university congregation, gives advice about how to learn well. One of the things he recommends is to answer questions prudently. Any response should correspond to the intellectual ability of the one responding - don't try to answer something that is beyond your capacity. Your response should correspond to the character of the one who is asking the question of you. Thirdly, it should be a response to the question asked and not just waffle or, in St Thomas's words, 'full of wind'.

Obviously it is the second of these which is in play in today's gospel reading. The chief priests, scribes and elders put a question to Jesus about his authority for doing the things he does. Jesus replies with a question of his own: was the Baptist's baptism from heaven or earth?

Their hesitation reveals that their initial question was disingenuous: their interest in his answer was not genuine as they wanted, as they did elsewhere in the gospels, to trap him. So he leaves them with the question about his own authority.

Apart from confirming the wisdom of Saint Thomas's advice - your response should correspond to the character of the one who is asking the questin of you - what else can we take from this incident? One thing we can take is the reminder that we need to clarify our own motives in asking questions of others. Are we genuinely interested in the knowledge they can share with us or have we some other motive in asking it of them? Are we genuinely interested in them at all or only in some agenda of our own?

Likewise for the questions we put to God.

Sincere questioning means we have put our faith in the one to whom we put the question. We are not teasing or provoking or trying to embarrass them. Sincere questioning is one of the most important things a student has to do. But 'a student must believe' is a piece of wisdom from the ancient world. A student must trust the teacher. And this is what is lacking in the opponents of Jesus. They do not believe in him, they do not trust him, and so he does not entrust himself to them.

The first reading today is from the Letter of Jude but frm the verses we read it omits his reference to scoffers which is actually very relevant to the gospel that accompanies it. The words of the apostles to which Jude refers, omitted from the reading, are that 'there will be scoffers, setting up divisions'. Recalling that then what follows makes more sense: 'build yourselves up on your most holy faith, pray in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, wait for the mercy of our Lord, Jesus Christ'. 

If we do those things then we are in a right disposition to put our questions to God. What is even more wonderful, we are in a right disposition to receive from God direct, truthful and life-giving answers. If we entrust ourselves to God, God will entrust himself to us. For He has already done so, sending the Son and the Spirit.