Saint Thomas the Apostle - 3 July

Readings: Ephesians 2:19-22; Psalm 116; John 20:24-29

The apostle Thomas is to be thanked not so much for asking the reasonable question - 'you expect me to believe that without some evidence? ' - as for being the first Christian to direct our attention to the wounds of Jesus. It is sometimes said that John's gospel is the most spiritual of the gospels but it can just as easily be described as the most physical. It begins by telling us that the Word became flesh and it ends telling us about the fleshliness of the Risen Lord, how physical a reality He is. The moment in which his flesh is opened and penetrated by the soldier's lance is of great significance: blood and water flowed out, as the one who witnessed it can testify. Thomas is invited to retrace the route of the lance.

The body of the Risen Lord is marked by the wounds of his passion. The damage done to him in the course of his life and death, the scars of his work, the abuse to which he was subjected - all of this can heal in some ways, it is even taken up into the glorification of his body, but it will always be there, it will always be a fact about the life lived in this body, the suffering endured by it. The story of that body's experience in this world is forever inscribed in its flesh. Thomas helps us to see that there is damage done to bodies that can never be undone, that there are wounds, weaknesses and imperfections that are still to be seen even in the glory of the Resurrection. Thomas sets it up for Jesus to teach us that by His wounds we are healed, because in His wounds He is glorious.

Vulnera means wounds, vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. Bodies that are only fantasies cannot be wounded or affected in any way, they cannot be touched, and are not susceptible to suffering. But Jesus shared in the suffering and endurance that comes in every human life. This is what bodies are capable of, suffering, endurance, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. This is what the glorified body of Jesus is gloriously capable of, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. In other words, in his risen body, and more than ever, he is capable of loving.

We become expert at knowing the vulnerabilities of others and the more intimately we share life the more expert we are at this. We can exploit and abuse others, taking advantage of their vulnerability. But it is in wounds and in weakness, in limitation and in imperfection, that the work of grace is seen most clearly. The disciples realised this early, Paul most remarkably, that when we are weak we are strong, that God's grace is sufficient for our weakness, that God's weakness is more powerful than human strength and his foolishness wiser than human wisdom. The saints who are most useful to us are not the ones who are photoshop-perfect, whom we project into a place of super-human perfection. The saints who are most useful to us are the ones in whom we see God's grace shining gloriously through human weakness, in the first place the apostles themselves in their fragility and vulnerability, Peter who vacillates and Doubting Thomas.

We must look then to the wounds of Our Lord and also to our own wounds. These are places of suffering, but that means they are places that solicit love, for to love is to be vulnerable, touchable, open to sharing the sufferings of another. The body of the Risen Lord is the most beautiful, glorious, compelling, and seductive, body in creation. And it is so because in the Resurrection it remains a body capable of breathing and living, capable of touching and loving. We do not worship idols that are dead no matter how beautiful they seem. We worship the living and true God who shares our weakness so that we (even in our flesh) might share His glory.

Week 13 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Amos 5:14-15, 21-24; Psalm 49; Matthew 8:28-34

Deus humanissimus - God most human - is a phrase associated with the theological work of the Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx. It comes to mind in thinking about today's readings which present us with various kinds of monstrous creatures, surreal activities and confusing human behaviour. In the midst of so much distortion and confusion stands one who is simply and wholly human, one with a heart of flesh, Jesus, radiating truth and compassion.

Away with solemnities and feasts, says Amos, with holocausts and oblations, with fattened cattle and noisy liturgies. Today's passage is a short summary of things Amos says frequently and more stridently throughout his book. Why not be simply human, he asks, showing your religious devotion and your faith in God by living justly and practising goodness? It is how you treat other people that is most important. Let justice and goodness guide your actions and characterise your personality: they are simple things but preferred by God in place of elaborate ceremonies accompanied by the distortions of corruption and injustice.

The gospel reading then takes us into a world that is like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, weird and wonderful, surreal and unsettling, dark and twisted. The demoniacs are human beings but possessed by evil spirits and so they are not in their right minds, they are not simply human. The demons themselves are not human either of course and their agenda is to distort and fragment, to disturb the balance of creation, and to distract people from justice and goodness. The ways and means of doing this are not important, they will try anything, and many things work. Neither are the unfortunate swine human, innocent victims in this tale, carrying the curse of being classified as unclean in earlier parts of sacred scripture.

The swineherds, like the disciples in yesterday's reading, are out of their minds with fear, running away to tell everything that had happened, including what happened to the demoniacs. It is a strange gloss: one would have thought that the main thing they had to tell was what had happened to the demoniacs. Instead we are told that they told the whole story, they reported everything ... including what happened to the demoniacs.

The whole story - how far back did they go in telling the story? The story they have to tell is about Jesus. Paradoxically, the figure in the story who is simplest and most straightforward is the one who is most terrifying. Having received a full report, the whole town set out to meet him and as soon as they saw him they implored him to leave the neighbourhood! One would have thought that a neighbourhood familiar with demons, demoniacs and swine would have been able to bear the presence among them of one who is simply and wholly human. But it is not so. He is, it seems, the most fear provoking character in the story and they ask him to leave them alone. Whatever it is about him.

Among the strange and startling creatures that appear in these pages of the gospel, screaming demons and demented pigs, the would-be followers, the doubting disciples, the terrified townspeople - there is one who is fulfilling the plan of creation with integrity and clarity. His, in the words of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, is 'the right human face' and humankind cannot bear very much of that simple reality, of the judgment implied in it, of the holiness it reveals. Edwin Muir's poem is cool spring water compared with the distortions recounted in the scripture readings:

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face. / I in my mind had waited for this long,

Seeing the false and searching for the true, / Then found you as a traveller finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong / Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you, 

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste, / A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good, an eye / That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed, / The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea, / Not beautiful or rare in every part,

But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

- Edwin Muir, 'The Confirmation', published in The Narrow Place, 1943

Week 13 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Amos 3:1-8; Psalm 5; Matthew 8:23-27

The series of questions in the first reading seem to be all of the kind 'is the Pope a Catholic?' The answer seems to be obvious, easy and simple in each case: the connection between the two parts of each question is perfectly clear and well known. The lion's roar, the falling bird, the effect of a trumpet sounding - there are immediate and predictable connections of 'cause and effect' in each case. So Amos implies.

Some aspects of the relationship between God and the people are as obvious as these connections in nature and in human affairs. If God is angry, it will be particularly with the ones He has chosen that He will be angry. (The more you are given, the more will be expected of you.) If God is acting, then He will not do so without revealing his plans to the prophets. And if the Lord speaks to His prophet, the prophet in turn must speak (remember that Amos, who knows what it involves, is reluctant to take on the task of prophesying.)

There is causality - 'therefore' - between the Lord's choice and what is expected of the people. There is causality - 'therefore' - between the prophet's vocation and what he must do. There is causality - 'therefore' - between the people's behaviour and the way God must react in response: 'prepare to meet your God'. Is it a threat or a promise?

This last kind of causality is deeply problematic. Is it true that we know how God must act in response to human behaviour? Is God obliged to anything? Has God bound Himself to particular ways of acting which cannot be suspended even if God, in the words of the prophet Jonah, repents of what He intended to do?

The gospel reading gives us two more examples of causality, one is obvious, easy and simple, and the other is mysterious, takes us beyond the merely problematic, and raises the deepest possible questions.

The easy one is the connection between a sudden storm at sea and the fear it provokes in those on a small boat caught in the storm. Even experienced fishermen - they more than anyone else - fear the sea, for they know what it can be like and what it can do. Does a storm break out at sea and the fisherman not fear? Does a man rebuke wind and sea and the storm stops?

The mysterious 'therefore' in the gospel is the one that connects Jesus rebuking the winds and the sea and the storm ceasing. This provokes astonishment: 'what kind is he?', they ask (what sort of human being, what kind of agent, with what force or power working in him or through him?) that even the wind and the seas obey him? For one who knows the Bible the obvious answer seems shocking, even blasphemous: it is the Lord who commands the waters, divides them, and sets limits to their flowing.

It sends us back to the last kind of causality that the first reading seemed to express. God can only act as God and that is always with full freedom, out of love, in order to create. A God of retribution, anger and appropriate punishment fits more neatly into the framework of cause and effect that we can manage. He would be an agent within our world, subject to its laws, just bigger and more powerful than any other agent in that world. But if this is all we say about God then we are speaking of an idol. Instead we are invited, by Jesus and by the Father he reveals to us, to open our minds and hearts to the vast spaces of divine freedom, to the infinite creativity of divine power, to the unpredictable and revolutionary tenderness of One who is, always and everywhere, Everlasting Love. We must learn about God's retribution, anger and punishment by studying Jesus, his words, his teaching, his experience.

Prepare to meet your God. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Threat or promise?

SS Peter and Paul -- 29 June

Readings: Acts 12:1-11; Psalm 33(34); 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-19

'He who sits in the heavens laughs.' We can speculate as to what might bring a smile to God's lips. Religion is often presented as a very, very serious business and yet today's feast brings to mind many amusing things. Peter for example is called 'rock' and he is as changeable as the weather. He is a stone invited to float on water. Paul seems to have been something of a control freak, taking charge and breathing fury, and yet he is led by the hand into Damascus and later escapes from the city by being let down over the wall in a basket.

There are echoes of Jonah in the way Peter and Paul are pulled and shoved this way and that. Their releases from prison, Peter in Acts 12 and Paul in Acts 16, are pieces of comedy also. Paul has been rescued out of the mouth, not of a sea monster, but of the more familiar lion. Peter begins to sink as soon as he remembers what he is doing and is, not for the last time, rescued from the deep by his Lord. They are thumped by angels and beaten by men, we can say, pushed around and reminded again and again that they are instruments of the gospel, instruments in the hands of the Lord they have come to love.

This may seem cruel until we see its results. For example, their experiences make it clear that human beings are not gods. In Acts 14 Paul is mistaken for a god and, when he disappoints, is subsequently stoned. God uses human personalities, even and especially their limitations and weaknesses, to make them instruments of his grace and glory. He takes them up into his work but when we see their weaknesses and smile at their foibles there is no danger that we will mistake them for the God they serve.

Another good result from seeing the humanity of Peter and Paul is that we can think again about what is really serious. God's love is really serious. The gates of hell will not prevail against the kingdom of that love. Nothing else compares with it as both Peter and Paul testify, Peter with his question 'Lord, to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life', Paul with those magnificent texts scattered through his letters that neither success nor failure, illness nor health, poverty nor riches, strength nor weakness, things present, past or to come, nothing in all creation compares to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, sharing in his sufferings so as to share in the glory of his resurrection.

In 751 BC two brothers founded a city, Romulus and Remus, the wonderful city of Rome, established on pride, ambition and eventually murder. In the first century, and without setting out to do it, two brothers in the Lord, Peter and Paul, founded a city on the same spot, as instruments of God, witnesses to God's love by their preaching and teaching, in how they lived and in how they died, a city founded on faith, and hope, and love.

Week 13 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: 2 Kings 4.8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89; Romans 6.3-4, 8-11; Matthew 10.37-42

What kind of analogy is it, the one that is spoken of with the little words 'as' and 'so'? What kind of comparison? It is found often in the Gospel of John, for example 'as the Father sent me, so I send you' (John 20.21) and 'as I live because of the Father, so you will live because of me' (John 6.57). In today's readings we find it in St Paul's Letter to the Romans: 'as' Christ was raised from death, 'so' we, in being baptised, die with him in order that we too might live a new life'. 

As the resurrection of Jesus is not just a restoration but a new creation, so all who are in Christ are a new creation also (2 Corinthians 5.17). Whenever creation is involved the power of God needs to be engaged and we see that power working through the prophet Elisha in the first reading. He promises a son to a woman who has no children, a veritable new creation also, to make her be a mother.

As it was with Christ, so it will be with us. And this continues in the gospel reading where he asks us to let go of every attachment in order to follow him. Even our attachment to ourselves. That seems very demanding, practically impossible for the kind of creature that we are. But by God's grace - and nothing is impossible for God - it becomes as simply as giving a cup of cold water to one of the 'little ones'.

Reading on in the Gospel of Matthew we soon come to the passage where Jesus calls us to learn from him and to take his yoke upon us, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. As the yoke was shouldered by Jesus and as the burden was carried by him, so we are empowered by God's grace to follow him. It is love that makes the yoke easy and the burden light. As he loved us so we are to love him and one another (John 13.34).

We should perhaps call it the 'Christological analogy': as things are for Christ in relation to the Father, so they are for us in relation to Him and to the Father. It means taking seriously, literally, what St Paul means when he speaks of us 'being in Christ', or when he says 'it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me' (Galatians 2.20).

Let us give thanks for this gift of grace which enables us to live for God as Jesus lived - and lives - for God.

Week 12 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Lamentations 2.2, 10-14, 18-19; Psalm 73/74; Matthew 8.5-17

In Holy Week 2020, in the deserted churches and basilicas of Rome, the plaintive poetry of the Book of Lamentations echoed around empty pews. Never was that text more actual. The condition of the city outside, deserted, abandoned and occupied by wild animals, silently witnessing the deaths of thousands of people, was exactly as these ancient poems describe.

It is only rarely, thank God, that a whole city or country, never mind the whole world, goes into 'lockdown'. But it happens regularly, and in different ways, for individuals and families and smaller communities. On any day, somewhere in the world, there are individuals, families, other groups living through afflictions 'as huge as the sea'. Something has happened that is devastating for them, a sadness or anxiety so big,  a loss or betrayal so fundamental, that it seems beyond any possibility of healing. 'Who can possibly cure you', the poet asks.

Cry and cry out is his recommendation. Let your tears flow like a torrent day and night. There is honesty and relief in tears, let them flow. And cry out also, to God, pouring out your heart along with your tears, stretching out your hands as you pleas for God's help.

Such devastations may leave us feeling that it is beyond even God's power to help, for some reason we may believe that it is beyond God's care and concern. We can then make our own once again, as we do at every Mass, the words of the centurion who came to Jesus asking for help: 'Lord, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured'.

Just give the word and I, we, will be cured. The word of love, the word of peace, the word of forgiveness, the word of healing: it will be enough for the Creator of all things and the Lord of history to set things right. Isaiah foretold it and Jesus fulfilled it and it is as true for us today - 'he takes our sicknesses away and carries our diseases for us'. Do not be afraid to approach him, whatever the desolation in which you find yourself, and to lay all your affliction before him.

Week 12 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: 2 Kings 25:1-12; Psalm 136 (137); Matthew 8:1-4

The destruction of Israel recounted in the first reading is comprehensive - everything is lost, destroyed or exiled: the leadership, the temple, the palace, the walls, the population, the army. The people of God, for whom these things were signs confirming God's presence and protection, God's special choice of them, is completely abandoned by God (so it seems) and is utterly powerless. The catastrophe is total and complete.

What are the implications for how they are to think now about God? Is God also impotent in this situation? Is God testing their faith in a way more severe than the way in which he tested the faith of Abraham? At least with Abraham God pulled back at the last minute. Is it because the people have sinned and God is angry that this disaster has come upon them? What depth of sin, what depth of anger, could have led to this?

The psalm is one of the most beautiful in the Bible, plaintive and poignant - sing to us, they said, one of Zion's songs. How could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil, ask the people, when here we are sitting and weeping by the rivers of Babylon.

'The Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets' we say in the creed every Sunday, and the Spirit speaks more powerfully than anywhere else in what he inspires in the prophets of the Exile. Obliged to think things out again from the very beginning, the prophets of that time (Second Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel ...) saw that the faith of Israel obliged them to believe that God alone suffices . There is only one God, creator and lord of all. There is nowhere else to go. They have had human kings but it is the Lord who is their real king, the real guide and custodian of their lives. The loss of everything is a concrete way in which they were faced with the reality of their faith, its truth: do you really believe that God alone suffices?

Over and over again those of us who say 'Lord, Lord', and  who go on saying 'Lord, Lord', nevertheless continue to invest our hope and to find our security in things that are less than God. Again and again, therefore, we need to be weaned from our idols and learn to attach ourselves to God alone. Sometimes the experience is not so painful. Sometimes the experience is very painful indeed. Sometimes it dismantles us completely and is a kind of death.

The comprehensive disaster experienced by the people at the time of the Exile was experienced by individuals who contracted leprosy. The devastation of their personal, family and social life was as complete as the devastation of Jerusalem at the hands of the Assyrians. The very same questions arise in relation to that illness: Is God impotent? Is God angry? Is it a punishment for sin? For whose sin, my own, my family's, my ancestors? What is the state of my relationship with God now in this condition of leprosy? Is there any basis for hope? What sense would it have to hope in a God whose laws oblige me to be cast out in the way that I am? How can I learn what I need to learn about this, how am I to understand?

The leper in today's gospel gives us a lesson in humble prayer, coming straight from the heart of a needy person, piercing the clouds, and reaching directly to the throne of God's grace - 'if you want to, you can heal me'. To which Jesus reaches out and touches him - think of the power there is in that touch, reaching across the boundaries of loss, separation and exile, to restore the person not just to health but to family and to society. 'Of course I want to, be clean', is how the words of Jesus are sometimes translated. God alone suffices, the prayer of the humble person cannot fail to reach him, God is all tenderness and compassion so how could he not respond to the need of the person?

So we can make the leper's prayer our own, in whatever situations or circumstances we may find ourselves - 'if you want to, you can ...'. And the voice of Jesus will respond as quickly and as surely as he did to the leper - 'of course I want to, let it be ...' It is a revolutionary moment, an anticipation of the new dispensation being introduced by Jesus and of the new creation being inaugurated by him.

It does not mean that there will not be moments of loss, exile and death. It does not mean that there will not be moments in which we feel abandoned and cast aside. But even from the heart of such experiences - when we sit weeping by the rivers of whatever Babylon is our place of exile - even from there (especially from there) we must go on saying 'if you want to, you can ...'