Lent Week 5 Wednesday

Readings: Daniel 3:14-20, 91-92, 95; Daniel 3:52-56; John 8:31-42

Today we have another set of readings which relativise human structures of power, authority and justice. The three young men in the fiery furnace are one more 'type' of Christ, saved as they are by divine intervention because they are servants of the true God and refuse to worship any other god. They are at odds with Nebuchadnezzar and with his system of power, authority and justice, just like so many thousands of martyrs across the centuries who gave their lives rather than serve or worship gods other than the Lord, the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus, the one God who is living and true.

One of the most often quoted statements of the gospel is found in Jesus' comments about this same matter: 'the truth will set you free'. In his life of Saint Dominic the English Dominican Bede Jarrett (who died on St Patrick's Day in 1935) shows how Dominic confirmed for his first followers the truth of this gospel principle: by seeking the truth in the way Dominic taught them (and in this he is simply 'dominicus', the Lord's man), the first Dominicans did not 'find' the truth (since who can contain God?) but they did become free, they found a new freedom of joy and love in their service of the Word of God which is the truth.

It is important to quote the full statement of Jesus: 'If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free'. This freedom that comes from the truth is found by remaining in the word of Jesus. It means by living as his disciples, following his way, living out in our own lives the way of loving the Father and the world which is the heart of Jesus's life and mission.

We have seen Jesus appealing to Moses, teaching his interlocutors that fidelity to Moses should lead them to faith in him. Now he appeals to Abraham, teaching them that fidelity to Abraham should lead them to faith in him. It is not on the basis of some esoteric exegesis that he argues in this way with them but simply on the basis of the Father's presence in the life of Moses and in the life of Abraham. Is Moses your father? Is Abraham your father? There is one who is 'the Father', Jesus says, the Father of Moses and the Father of Abraham, and my Father too, the one who sent me and because of whom I am here.

Jesus is struggling to convince them to lift their eyes beyond Moses and beyond Abraham, beyond their own traditions and laws, beyond their own structures of power, authority and justice, to look up and beyond and within to the One who sustains all things, who confirms all goodness, who establishes all truth. It is He, 'First Truth' as Thomas Aquinas will call him, who sets free, who draws our minds and hearts through the contingent and passing concerns of this world, to rest in Him, in his power, his authority, his justice - the reality we will see revealed in the greatest of the Son's works, his glorious resurrection from the dead. There is the truth waiting to be revealed. There is the place of true freedom.

Let us remain with Jesus, living as his disciples, so that we will know this truth and enter already into the freedom which comes with our thirst for it.

Lent Week 5 Tuesday

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 102; John 8:21-30

The birth we are witnessing has many consequences. One of them is new life - eternal life - for those who come to believe in Christ, those who come to believe that he is, as he says twice in this gospel passage, the 'I am'. He is the Lord, the presence of God, the one who reveals the Father to the world.

The salvation of humanity and the healing of the world: these are consequences of this birth whose labour pains are steadily stronger as we move through the fifth week of Lent. And these things come about alongside another consequence of infinite significance: we are given a new understanding of God. The One Jesus refers to as 'the Father' is made known to us and we glimpse what he is like.

The contrast between two pictures of God in today's readings brings this out very clearly. In the Book of Numbers God is vindictive and punishing, a 'big man' whose patience is limited, who speaks the language of sin and punishment, who is trapped, it seems, within the same recurring dynamic as the people. If they are ungrateful and complaining then he will punish them and this time he does so by sending deadly snakes among them.

We will, of course, sympathise with the people who are trying to understand God's way of working in their lives. God continues to act like an unsteady 'big man' who is at times sentimental about his people and at times angry with them. Here, when they show signs of repentance also, he immediately repents of the evil he is doing them: they kiss and make up and the story continues.

Jesus also associates sin and death. He speaks of people dying because of sin, or rather of people dying in their sins. But he does not say that the Father is out to kill them. Sin brings death with it. Sin is itself a kind of death. Who will rescue us from this body of death?, Saint Paul cries. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The bronze serpent, by a kind of sympathetic magic, cures people who have been bitten by the real serpents. Jesus lifted up on the cross is a kind of bronze serpent taking into himself all the power of sin and evil and death, so that whoever comes to believe belongs with him where he is in the company of the Father. Believing in the Son of Man lifted up is the equivalent of looking at the bronze serpent.

Jesus is also pleading with us to understand what the Father is like, that he is not the primitive god of tribal religions anymore than he is a lifeless idol. He is the one who sent Jesus and that already tells us much about him. He is the one who sent Jesus not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.

Our ego will have us focusing on the consequences for us of this birth. But the more important consequences are simply the revelation of the Father (what God is like: the only Son alone can teach us this) and the revelation of the union between the Father and the Son (I do nothing on my own, I say only what the Father taught me, he is with me, and I always do what pleases him).

Let us try to forget ourselves and to think only in the second place of the consequences for us of this birth into which Jesus is entering. Let us try instead to keep our minds and hearts fixed on him, the loving servant, the beloved son, the one who is teaching us that the life of God is love, the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as sin is already a kind of death, so seeing this divine mystery is already eternal life. 'This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).

It is no longer simply the case that God beholds the earth from his heaven. Now he leads us in our journey from this world into the kingdom of eternal love. It is a journey that will take him to Gethsemane and to Golgotha before it takes him to Easter and Pentecost.

Lent Week 5 Monday

Readings: Daniel 13:1-9, 15-17, 19-30, 33-62; Psalm 23; John 8:12-20

It is a fair attempt at ensuring due process and a fair trial, to insist, as the law of Moses did, on the testimony of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15-21). It was an effort an ensuring that there could not be miscarriages of justice. Of course conspiracies to frame people and have them unjustly tried were always possible as long as people were prepared to get together to bear false witness. It was one of the major commandments of the law, and is one of the essential structures of any just society, that people not bear false witness but speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

We know from experience that no system of justice is perfect and that no combination of human beings involved in administering a system of justice will do so perfectly. It is one of the strongest arguments against capital punishment: no matter how good the system of justice might be, it is always administered by human beings and therefore liable to distortion and corruption. In the case of capital punishment there is no going back.

In the final days of Lent we are presented with figures who are unjustly treated even when the system of justice is being followed correctly. Susanna is one such figure and we hear about her in today's long but dramatic first reading. From the early days of the Church she has been a 'type of Christ', foreshadowing in her experience what was to happen to Jesus later on. It requires divine intervention, working through Daniel, to illuminate the truth of the situation. Here the testimony of two corrupt witnesses will be enough to condemn Susanna unless the Lord intervenes to ensure that a higher justice - the justice of truth rather than simply that of evidence - triumphs in her case.

In the final days of Jesus' life there is much focus on the justice of the trial he received. It was easy for the authorities who wanted to destroy him to find someone in his circle to betray him and it was easy for them to find others to testify against him. When false witnesses arise and speak against him they report his words but fail to see the true meaning of those words. 'He said he would destroy the Temple and raise it in three days'. 'He is telling us not to pay tribute to Caesar and that he himself is a king.' They are confused, Mark's gospel tells us, and understandably so since Jesus is trying to lead people beyond their normal categories of thought, expectation and understanding.

Who are to be the witnesses that will vindicate Him? In the passages from John's gospel which we read these days there is much about this question. We see the kind of non-judgmental judge Jesus is - his treatment of the woman taken in adultery is simply the most powerful moment in that revelation. But what of Jesus himself? Who will bear witness to Him? Who can vindicate the justice of His cause? Who will confirm the truth of His teaching?

It can only be the Father, says Jesus, He is the one who vindicates me, who bears witness to me, who confirms the truth of what I am saying. The Father knows where I come from and where I am going, Jesus says, because it is He who sent me. So the requirement of the Law, that there be the testimony of two witnesses, is fulfilled: the Father and Jesus can bear witness to who he is, to his origin and to his mission. But we might well sympathise with the confusion of the witnesses, even with disciples struggling to understand, if the logic of Jesus's argument in today's gospel reading is not immediately clear.

We need more light if we are to have any hope of understanding what Jesus is saying here. We believe that light has been given in the events we celebrate in the coming days. For the moment at least this much is clear: Jesus moves forward on the strength of his relationship with the Father. If everything else falls away, as eventually everything else will fall away, this will stand. He is sure of the Father's presence and certain too that, when the hour comes, the Father will bear witness to the Son in ways that only the creating power of God can as yet imagine.

Lent Sunday 5 Year C

Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 125; Philippians 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

From the very beginning, the Church, the community of believers in Jesus, was unsettled by this story. We have evidence for this in the earliest manuscripts of the gospels. This story wandered around the New Testament before finally settling at the beginning of John 8. The most ancient authorities actually omit it, others add it here, or after John 7:36, or after John 21:25, or even in St Luke's gospel, after Luke 21:38. Not only does it wander from place to place in an unusual way, there are also differences, as we would expect, in the text.

What does it mean? It seems to mean that the first Christians were pretty much like us, unsure how to show forth mercy without it seeming to be indulgent, unsure how to illustrate justice without it seeming cruel and lacking in compassion. We can note in passing that the word of Jesus from the Cross, 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do', suffered similar treatment before it finally settled as part of Luke's passion narrative: the believers were unsure about it. Might Jesus seem too soft, tolerant of evil?

We need to be grateful, therefore, to the Holy Spirit who found a way to fasten this story into the Gospel of St John in spite of the perplexity of believers. It has come down to us in spite of the doubts of believers and thank God that it has.

The treatment of the woman caught in adultery reminds us of something seriously wrong in human beings. We have an interest in thinking about other people's sins and, even more, we do not hesitate to use other people's sins to serve our own purposes and agendas. The people who bring her before Jesus have no real interest in the woman, they are using her to trap him. But they are no match for the combination of intelligence and love that we see in Jesus, they melt away miserably before the combination of justice and mercy we see in him. One of the Fathers of the Church wrote of it, 'quam dulcis est Dominus per mansuetudinem et rectus per veritatem', 'how sweet the Lord is in kindness and how right in truth'.

One of the places where this story ended up in the early manuscripts was after John 21:25, after the Resurrection. And there is lots here about newness and about the re-creation that forgiveness is, reconciliation, the new creature made right before God through the love and obedience of the Son. The other readings at Mass support this view of it: 'I am doing a new deed' (Isaiah), 'I forget the past and strain ahead for what is still to come' (Philippians). The opening of the story draws us towards the cosmology of the resurrection: 'it was early in the morning', the encounter is at the dawn of a new day. The finger of God writes something in dust as the hand of God brought the first human being out of the dust.

The iron trap set by his enemies and by the woman's tormentors seems to leave no way out, no resolution. But the intelligence, love, justice, and kindess of God transforms the situation. It can be a model for us as we think about approaching Christ in the sacrament of reconciliation this Easter time. No matter what 'iron traps' bind our hearts or paralyse our lives, God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, through the grace of the sacrament spring forth freedom and new life.

Lent Week 4 Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 7; John 7:40-53

We are well into the second part of Lent. We have left far behind our concern with ourselves and with our efforts at repentance. The concern now is Jesus and the growing opposition to him. The first readings tell us of innocent people unjustly persecuted – Joseph, Jeremiah, Susanna, the just man of Wisdom 2 – while the readings from Saint John's gospel show how the pressure is mounting on the leaders of the people as the questioning about the identity of Jesus grows more intense.

Today’s gospel reading ends strangely: ‘then each went to his own house’. It seems like an insignificant detail, as if it were to say ‘then they went home for their supper’. There is a contrast between the ordinariness of this return home and the significance of what they had been talking and arguing about.

One of the main questions for now is this: ‘where is Jesus’ home?’ Some prophecies said he would come from Bethlehem while others seemed to indicate that he would be a Nazarene. The gospels give reasons for believing that he comes from each of those places, Bethlehem the home in which he was born, Nazareth the home in which he grew up.

But there is a growing contrast between these ordinary senses of ‘home’ – the comfort of knowing where people come from gives us the comfort of knowing something of their identity – and a sense that the true origins of Jesus are mysterious. They are mysterious not just in the sense that historical scholarship will fail to prove things one way or the other. They are mysterious in a much more profound and transcendent sense. The true home of Jesus is the one he shares with the Eternal Father. The true origin of Jesus is his being sent from the Father. When St John says that ‘each went to his own house’ it means in the case of Jesus that he went to the Father. For the moment he does this in prayer and prayer permeates his life: he is always in the presence of his Father. As the story unfolds he will return home to the Father in the mystery of his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus is more and more a stranger whom the people and their leaders try to pin down, to find out whether or not he is the messiah, whether he is the prophet who was to come. Jesus simply gets on with his work, which is to open the doors of his home to all who will become his disciples. We are being prepared for further instruction about the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the hearts of believers. If we keep his commandments and live according to his way of love, then God will dwell in us and with us. God will share His home with us, so that where the Son is, when he goes home at the end of His day, we will be there also to share the glory that was His before the world was made.

Lent Week 4 Friday

 Readings: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22; Psalm 34; John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

From her work with very young children, Melanie Klein concluded that envy is a basic and perennial aspect of human experience. In her account of things, envy becomes the ‘original sin’ of humanity, a negative reaction to the source of good when it is being good towards me. It is a kind of resentment that the source of good is so good. The generosity of ‘the good breast’ is experienced as a kind of power over me which obliges me to be grateful and causes me to feel humiliated.

The first reading of today’s Mass is a powerful description of the effects of envy. The good person, simply by being good, is experienced as passing some kind of judgement on my way of living. Klein spoke of envy driving people into what she called the paranoid-schizoid position and we see these things described also in the first reading. The other person’s holiness is experienced as a threat to me even when that holiness places itself at my service. ‘Even to see him is a hardship for us’. We can presume that the just one is not making the judgements that the wicked attribute to him but their paranoia projects these judgements on to him. ‘In their thoughts they erred’: the deadly sins originate always in fantasies, thoughts that we find rising up within us without our having put them there. Of all these deadly thoughts, envy is one of the most insidious.

Envy hates to see others happy, or good, or holy. It experiences the happiness, goodness and holiness of others as some kind of deprivation. Thomas Aquinas describes it as a kind of sadness which results from feeling that God’s gifts to another person somehow take away from my worth and excellence. In this it is, of course, a kind of madness, but then all the deadly sins are forms of madness. Envy prevents me admiring and respecting others. I will feel obliged to pull them down in some way, to attribute wicked motives to them, to undermine the reputation they have for goodness.

Envy cannot bear to be grateful which is why it resents the source of good not only when it is being good to others but even when it is being good to myself. To be grateful is to acknowledge dependence and this is something envy cannot bear, it feels like a loss of self. At its worst envy becomes violent and physically destructive. The sense of humiliation and resentment that accompanies it makes it feel justified in trying to destroy the good one whom it feels has brought about this terrible feeling of denigration, dependence and even annihilation in itself. So Jesus becomes the victim of envy, the motivations of his eventual destruction at the hands of men following exactly this analysis of envy and what it leads to.

To ‘begrudge a brother his grace’ is one way of describing what arises from envy. Not only does the envious person feel that God's gifts to others are a threat to him, he also envies the Holy Spirit who is the source of grace. We see clearly the kind of madness it is, not only to resent God’s gifts to others as if this were some kind of slight in my regard, but to envy the generosity of the Spirit, the abundant kindness of God’s good breast.

Envy would prefer that all should be equally unhappy and is the most debilitating of sins. It seeks to pull everybody down to the same level of misery. After it has done its worst to others it becomes self-consuming and self-destructive. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says that envy is the worst sin – all other sins are only against one virtue whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.

For Thomas Aquinas the cure for envy is charity. We see how powerful a vice envy is: only the most powerful of the virtues can dissolve its power. Loving others enables us to enjoy, rather than envy, their achievements and blessings. The gifts of God to those I love I will experience as gifts in which I share. It is essential that we understand the roots of envy in us, that we understand its madness, and that we grow in the virtue of charity, which alone conquers the violence and destruction wrought by envy.

The kindergarten, Melanie Klein's 'laboratory', is a place full of sweet and innocent children. It is also a place where envy first raises its ugly head and begins to distort and destroy any possibility of communion and friendship. Our hope depends on the One who, destroyed by our envy, is raised to a new life. This new life means even more abundant kindness and blessing for the world, along with the capacity to rejoice in, rather than to resent, the love that is beyond all envy.

Lent Week 4 Thursday

Readings: Exodus 32:7-14 ; Psalm 106; John 5:31-47

It is strange how the conversation between Moses and God in Exodus 32 parallels the conversation between the prodigal father and the elder brother in Luke 15. In the parable, which we have heard a few times recently, the elder brother disowns the prodigal son, referring to him when speaking to his father as ‘your son’. The father reminds his elder son that the prodigal is not just his (the father’s) son but is his (the elder brother’s) brother: ‘this, your brother, was lost and is found, he was dead and is returned to life’.

In today’s first reading it is God who seeks to disown the prodigal people, saying to Moses ‘go down at once to your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved’. Moses then takes the place of the prodigal father saying back to God, ‘why should your wrath blaze up against your own people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?’ Jesus in the gospel reading sends his listeners back to this point also: if they will not believe what Moses wrote then they will not listen to what Jesus is saying.

The most fascinating thing about this combination of readings is that it seems to be the Lord, the God of Israel, who was the first to listen to Moses and to believe in him! Moses called God back to Himself, as the prodigal son needs to come to himself. Moses reminds God of who He is, as the prodigal son needed to remember who he was. You are the One, says Moses, who brought your people out with mighty hand and marvelous works. They are not my people, thank you very much, they are your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt. What are the nations to say now about your purpose in doing this? Was it with an evil intention, to deceive and mislead this people and only, in the end, to destroy them?

And if that does not work, Moses makes a deeper, more ancient appeal. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he says to God, and your promises to them. You are the God of our fathers, not just the God of this recent wonder at the Red Sea, these recent marvels in Egypt. You are the God who has been involved with your people from way back, fashioning a people for yourself from ancient times. You swore to these promises by your own self: are you to be true to yourself, to who you are, the God of our fathers, now revealed as the Lord, the God of Israel?

It is stirring stuff, these dramas of betrayal and reconciliation, of forgetfulness and remembrance.  And we are approaching the final act of the definitive drama. Now, says Jesus, there are many witnesses to me. There is John the Baptist and there are the works I have been doing. There is the testimony of the Father speaking through these but to accept this you must believe in the Son whom the Father has sent. There is the scripture, the Word of God, written down by Moses but also remaining in the hearts of believers. With all these witnesses, a great cloud on every side we might say, why is it that you still do not believe?

Because you are stiff-necked, we hear God saying to Moses in the first reading. And Moses’ response is not to deny the people’s sinfulness and forgetfulness, just as the prodigal father does not deny the prodigal’s mistakes. Moses’ response is to remind God of who they are and who God is – they are your people whom you called long ago, and you are the God who swore by your own self that you would be their God and they your people.

Like an old married couple who have fought long and hard God and the people are inextricably bound to each other, they have grown into each other. This is not to minimize the consequences of their sins, which are great. It is to exalt the way in which God will now once again swear by His own self that He is committed to this covenant: He will seal it now in the blood of the Son, a new and eternal covenant which is yet as old as Abraham.

So God relents and repents of what he intended to do. Once again He visits His people and once again He faces into their sins and forgetfulness, to remind them and to restore them to His family: He forever their God, they - we! - forever His people.