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 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Philippians 1.18b-26; Psalm 41/42; Luke 14.1,7-11

The teaching of Jesus is not just a piece of social etiquette such as we find in parts of the wisdom literature: better to take a humbler place with the possibility of being promoted than to take a higher place with the possibility of being demoted (and the embarassment that would go with it). When he speaks about a 'wedding banquet' he is always speaking about the wedding feast in the kingdom that is coming. Who is entitled to be there? What is the basis of that entitlement? Where does the invitation come from? And how are people to be ranked at the wedding feast of the kingdom? Is anyone more important than anyone else? It seems that the answer is 'no'

People are looking closely at each other. This happens at wedding banquets. People have keen eyes for each other, to see old friends and family members, but also to see who is more 'in', to see what the fashion and style is: it is very good to have been invited in the first place and yet we wonder whether others are preferred to us in some way. Who does not think about their place when they see what the seating arrangment is?

Here though we must look first at the host. Of what kind or character is the host? And who is likely to be the more important in his kingdom. In Jesus' parables, the host is often the Heavenly Father who is always gracious and generous, kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked. Saint Paul often talks about this, from his personal experience, and he does so again in the first reading today. He is open to whatever the Spirit of God wants to do with him - to depart and be with Christ or to remain and continue to serve Christ in his neighbour. 

So today's readings are about humility and about grace. The humble person compares himself not with his fellow guests or even with an idea of what he thinks of himself. The humble person compares himself only with Christ, thereby knowing his own greatness and his own nothingness. This is, once again, what Paul does, keeping his focus exclusively on Christ, and encouraging his readers to boast only of Christ and of what he is doing in them.

The invitation to the heavenly banquet is a matter of grace, not entitlement. If you manage to live with a humility and generosity comparable to that of Christ you are already living the life of the resurrection. Those who live humbly and in true charity are already guests at the banquet, they are already citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

Week 30 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 5:21-33; Psalm 128; Luke 13:18-21

The readings today give us three domestic parables. It goes without saying that Jesus is wiser than Paul and perhaps we see it in a practical way here in the fact that his parables are so simple whereas Paul seeks to spell out the analogy based on marriage. In doing so he gives many hostages to fortune.

The two parables of Jesus could hardly be shorter. To what can the kingdom of God be compared? It is like a mustard seed which a man sows, it grows into a big shrub, and the birds come to make their nests in it. It is like the yeast which a woman adds to three measures of flour and eventually it is all leavened. That's it. No allegories, no commentaries, think about either of these situations and meditate on how the kingdom of God is like it. They are rich and wonderful.

Paul gives a much fuller explanation of the ways in which the relationship between Christ and the Church can be compared to marriage. His intention also is to keep us focused on the mystery of Christ and the Church, the mystery of the kingdom of God. The analogy he offers has a long biblical history. God is the husband of Israel and she is his wife. Jesus speaks of himself as the bridegroom inviting his disciples to continue to use the analogy, now in speaking about the relationship between Christ and his body, the Church.

But things get in the way of our meditating serenely on this passage. It has been used in the course of the centuries to support discrimination against women. There are some places where it is now considered unsuitable for celebrations of marriage. Social and political arguments about the equality of the sexes and the roles of men and women gather around as we listen to this reading and distract us from its main focus. Here is another domestic parable, an analogy, that teaches us important things about the kingdom of God. But its use over the centuries, and some of its phrases, make it a stumbling block.

One might begin to list the points that weigh against a discriminatory interpretation of this 'profound mystery': be subject to one another (it is mutual, not one-sided), out of reverence for Christ (the focus is on Christ), love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (this is the counterpart to the wife's obedience which represents our obedience to Christ), a husband loves his wife as his own body (the union is the most intimate possible), nourishing and cherishing her as Christ nourishes and cherishes the church (the mystery is the love of Christ for the Church).

The sowing of a mustard seed and the placing of yeast are rich subjects for meditating on the mystery of the kingdom, but neither has become a sacrament of the Church. Marriage, however, the fundamental domestic reality, is a sacrament of the Church, In some ways it is the paradigmatic sacrament since all the sacraments establish, express, and celebrate the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church, the covenant of life and love that binds the believer to Christ in the Church.

Acknowledging the difficulties this text generates for us we must, nevertheless, continue to listen to it and to meditate on its teaching, to try to glimpse the mystery. I can never hear it without thinking of the old Anglican marriage service during which the woman said to the man, but not he to her, that she will obey him. What a shocking thing, we might now say. But the man said to the woman, but not she to him, that he will worship her. Is that even more shocking?

Week 29 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 2.12-22; Psalm 84; Luke 12.35-38

THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

Oprah Winfrey has said that the most important book in her life is the Letter to the Ephesians. Scholars of the Bible tell us that Ephesians is more accurately described as ‘school of Paul’ rather than coming directly from the pen of Saint Paul himself. Nor does it seem like a letter in the ordinary sense. Its first half (chapters 1-3) is a majestic prayer and its second half (chapters 4-6) a homily or exhortation to worthy living. It begins with a brief greeting and ends with a brief farewell as if someone, in sending on the prayer and homily, adds a short covering note. In between is a wonderful summary of Christian ‘doctrine and life’.

The first half of Ephesians is one of the greatest Biblical texts on the theme of ‘grace’. It is read at Mass from last Thursday to Thursday of this week. Grace is God’s kindly love turned towards humanity, God’s generosity and forgiveness, God’s initiative in creating and re-creating. This kindly love is a blessing for us who receive it but is also a reason for us to bless God in return. In fact, God’s grace is itself the source of our capacity to give thanks to God in a way that is fitting.

God’s grace is not just a sentiment or a thought in God: it is something powerful and effective, a mystery hidden in God from all eternity but revealed historically in the election of God’s people, the coming of Jesus Christ and the founding of the Church in the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus.

Ephesians has much to say about the ‘household of God’, the community of the Church, where the variety of gifts ensures that the needs of the community are met and the unity of ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ means this variety is held together in harmony. The Church is where Jew and Gentile, reconciled through the death of Christ, share a new life of faith, integrity and holiness.

Nobody is a stranger or outsider to this mystery. Each of us is a participant in God’s grace. Each of us is called to be a ‘servant of the gospel’, ‘imitating God’ by loving as he loved us and offering ourselves as a fragrant offering.

In its second half, read at Mass from this Friday until Thursday of next week, Ephesians exhorts us to live lives worthy of what we have received, a translation into Christian terms of Shakespeare’s ‘to thine own self be true’. The motive for right living is that we be true to who we now are, that we ‘walk’ in accordance with our new life, that we grow towards the fullness of God and of Christ in which we already share. Our older, outer self dies as our newer, inner self is built up through faith, hope and love.

Worthy living for Ephesians is about honesty and integrity in speech, sexual relationships, family and business life. The language of Ephesians is marked by the social circumstances of its time but the key values remain pertinent and challenging, not least the placing of human marriage at the heart of the Christian mystery.

At first sight Ephesians might seem like exactly the kind of text we do not need: ‘wives be subject to your husbands’, for example. But it says a lot more: ‘submit to one another’ or ‘husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church and gives his life for her’, for example.

Ephesians stands in a long biblical tradition for which the relationship between God and God’s people is compared to marriage which is then a symbolic or ‘sacramental’ instance of the mutual love of God and God’s people. The focus for Ephesians is the intimacy of the married couple and how that unique human experience might help us to understand how close Christ is to the Church which is his body.

At first sight we might react to the language of Ephesians about married life. Thinking about this text again we might find ourselves wondering what it means for a man to make a woman holy by loving her or for a woman to make a man holy by loving him.

Both parts of Ephesians speak of power and of the Christian calling. God’s love is powerful in raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him above all other powers as head of the Church. Human beings are involved in the same mystery and are called to live it out by renouncing older ways of relating. Walking in a way that is worthy of our new life is only possible if we put on ‘the armour of God’, truth, integrity, faith. Our only strength is ‘in the Lord’ who has made us members of His household and whose grace continues to fashion us as ‘God’s work of art’.

Week 29 Monday (Year 2)

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

There are teachings on the dangers of wealth that are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. One cannot serve both God and Mammon, for example. The image of a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle is also found in all three Gospels: it is easier for a camel to do so than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But today’s parable is found only in the Gospel of Luke. In addition to his sensitivity and compassion – indeed, precisely because of them – Luke places particular emphasis on the dangers of wealth. He does not qualify the beatitude of the poor as Matthew does, by adding the phrase ‘in spirit’ – ‘blessed are you who are 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’, nor ‘woe to you who do not share what you have with others’. The mere fact of possessing things is in itself problematic.

‘None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions,’ we read in Luke 14. Luke 16 is one long warning. And Luke 16 is entirely centred on this warning against riches. Here we find the shrewd steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees described as ‘lovers of money’, and a strange encouragement to the disciples to use money – ‘that defiled thing’ – in the service of the kingdom.

In Luke we find Jesus’ teaching on riches in its most radical form. This teaching is, so to speak, made tangible here. It is not a question of our attitude towards our possessions, but a problem that arises from having possessions. The warning is that human beings inevitably begin to find meaning, security and a sense of identity in their possessions. Instead of using them, our possessions somehow become us, and we become them. We accumulate treasures of various kinds (not just money) to secure our lives, to give them meaning and to affirm a sense of identity: to be somebody. If it is through what we have that we become somebody, then we have lost ourselves.

Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading that ‘life does not consist of possessions’. To behave as if it did is to lose one’s life. To be truly ‘rich’ means to receive the gift of the Kingdom and to practise the generosity that lies at its heart: to let our possessions flow through us, so to speak, without regarding them as our own. It is another way of saying that we must become like Jesus who, though he was rich, made himself poor, so that we who are poor might become rich.

Week 29 Sunday Year A

Readings: Isaiah 45:1, 46; Psalm 96; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b; Matthew 22:15-21

Beginning with flattery (what the Irish will recognise immediately as plámás), Pharisees and Herodians question Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar. If he says 'pay' he is in one kind of trouble, if he says 'don't pay' he is in a different kind of trouble. Instead, and as usual, he takes the ground from beneath their feet and changes the basis of the question completely. Whose image is on the coin to be paid? Caesar's. Then give Caesar what is his. And give God what is His.

Sometimes this has been taken to mean that human life and affairs can be divided between a realm that belongs to Caesar (the state, political matters) and a realm that belongs to God (the Church, religion). But there is something wrong about the idea that there might be an area of human life that does not belong to God. And Jesus endorses our suspicion by what he says. Not explicitly, but very clearly.

If whatever bears the image of Caesar belongs to Caesar then whatever bears the image of God belongs to God. What is there that bears the image of God? If the image of Caesar is found on coins, where is the image of God to be found? We know from the Bible that it is the human being that bears the image of God. So it is the human being that belongs to God. And this cannot mean only some parts or aspects or activities of the human being, it must mean the human being in his or her entirety, in all her activities and relationships, in all his projects and commitments. It must mean also each and every single human being since no distinction is made: each and every one is created in the image and likeness of God.

It is a supremely clever answer. While seeming to divide human affairs between two masters Jesus does exactly the opposite, relativising our loyalty to 'Caesar' while acknowledging it, making it abundantly clear that such loyalty is always within a deeper, more all-embracing, and transcendent loyalty, that which is given to God alone. Give to God what belongs to God: in other words, everything.