St Dominic -- 8 August

Saint Dominic (c.1170 - 1221)

After the office of compline or night prayer, Dominicans traditionally salute Saint Dominic with a hymn which gives him the title, among others, of ‘preacher of grace’. In the two most important texts which describe his religious experiences, the Libellus or ‘Little Book’ of Jordan of Saxony and the record of the ‘Process of Canonisation’, the term grace is frequently used, along with cognate terms like ‘gracious’, ‘graceful’ and ‘graciousness’. With the term grace, a key word in his vocabulary, Jordan describes the freshness, enthusiasm, joy, freedom, light and gratitude that characterised the lives of Saint Dominic and his first followers whom he refers to as 'sons of grace, co-heirs of glory'.

The description of Saint Dominic as ‘preacher of grace’ can be understood in three ways. Firstly it might mean that he was gracious, attractive, encouraging, friendly and pleasant. Similarly we might speak of someone as a gracious person or use the word grace to describe the presence or performance of a speaker, artist, dancer or musician. Many witnesses to Dominic’s life support this understanding. Jordan talks about his delightful holiness, beautiful character and pleasant countenance which stirred all classes of people [Libellus 36, 103-04]. A witness called Brother Ralph says Dominic was happy, cheerful and pleasant [Process, 32]. Sister Cecilia paints a portrait of Dominic’s physical appearance as attractive and pleasant [Miracles of Saint Dominic, 15].

One might think ‘well, fans of Saint Dominic would say things like that’. Of greater interest here, though, are those testimonies which associate the ‘graciousness’ of Dominic with the experience of being loved by him or of coming to love him (Libellus, 21, 39, 104, 107; Process 36, 90).

A second meaning we can give to ‘preacher of grace’ is to take it that grace was a frequent subject of Dominic’s preaching. While none of his sermons have survived it seems clear that this understanding is accurate because of two things: his deep desire to reconcile people to the truth of God and his great compassion for those in distress. For Dominic God is a God of mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation, the God of grace.

A third meaning of ‘preacher of grace’ is that grace happened as Dominic spoke, acted and prayed. Once again this is confirmed by various witnesses: that the grace (now meaning power, light, help) of God was made present in those whose lives he touched. At Toulouse Dominic spent the night arguing ‘powerfully and passionately’ with an inn-keeper until ‘unable to withstand the wisdom and Spirit which was addressing him’ the inn-keeper was brought back to the faith ‘by the help of the Spirit of God’ [Libellus, 15]. A characteristic work of grace in the lives of many of the saints is a steadfastness, even stubbornness, when once they have reached a decision before God and this too is said of Dominic [Libellus, 103].

It is striking how quickly the story of Saint Dominic becomes the story of the first brothers and sisters of his Order and we find these three meanings of ‘grace’ recurring in their lives also. They are men and women of grace because among them are some very attractive, encouraging and inspiring personalities. Jordan himself, Reginald, Henry, Thomas, Diana d’Andalò, Cecilia and others are gracious, are united in friendship and make up a community characterised by enthusiasm and joy [for example Libellus 38 and 66].

The early Dominicans continue to preach God’s grace by proclaiming the compassionate, encouraging, challenging, grace-filled and reconciling Word of God. And finally grace continues to happen in and through them as they share with others the effects of the grace of God towards themselves [Libellus 58,69, 77-78; Process 24].

Closely associated with the term ‘grace’ in early Dominican sources is the term ‘joy’. As with the first followers of Saint Francis, the lives of the first Dominican friars and sisters was characterised by great freedom and joyfulness [Libellus 75]. Saint Dominic was remembered, among other things, for his joy in singing along the roads of Spain, France and Italy [Process 21].

The association of joy and grace is etymologically correct since in Greek the two terms are related: grace is charis and joy is chairo. In the annunciation to Mary the angel addresses Mary using both ‘grace’ and ‘joy’. ‘Hail full of grace’, he says, also translatable as ‘Rejoice highly favoured one’ [Luke 1.28]. As we will see, the moment of the annunciation in fulfilling the promised joys of the Old Testament is also the beginning of that grace which Christians believe to be at the heart of the gospel.

It has been like that in the history of Christianity ever since. Times of inspiration and fresh enthusiasm, what we might call ‘evangelical moments’, are times of new life among God’s people and they are always characterised by joyfulness. In Galatians 5.22-23 Saint Paul speaks of the experience of grace in terms of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’. Against such things, he adds, ‘there is no law’.

Times of fresh enthusiasm and evangelical renewal always require also fresh thinking and theological creativity. In the life and work of Saint Dominic the Holy Spirit was active in a way that brought new life and enthusiasm to the Church. His evangelical experience was complemented brilliantly by the theological reflection of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most outstanding of the second generation of Dominicans, by Saint Catherine of Siena, the outstanding Dominican of the 14^th century, and by many other men and women since then, Spirit-filled followers of Christ along the way of Saint Dominic.

Week 18 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Nahum 2:1, 3; 3:1-3, 6-7; Deuteronomy 3:35-36,39, 41; Matthew 16:24-28

'Paradox' is an over-used word for describing many of the sayings of Jesus. The term 'koan', taken from the training methods of Zen Buddhism, is at times a more fruitful concept to use. The koan is a statement or story whose wisdom cannot be accessed using the ordinary tools of analysis and logic. Reason understood narrowly, the rationalist in us who wants to take apart and control, cannot get at what it is about. But intellect, or understanding, can come to some understanding of what it might be about, a meditative reception and consideration of what is said, a meditation shaped by experience, a contemplation open to expand and to receive.

On the street one day I saw a homeless man sitting in a porch with his few possessions gathered round him, a dog, a sleeping bag, and a varied collection of odds and ends. It included a reading lamp set up at the head of the sleeping bag. Seeing him became a kind of koan for me as I began to wonder why a homeless man, sleeping on the street, would need a reading lamp, how he could ever get it to work, what he might read by its light (the rationalist in me) ... what was he saying to himself or to the rest of us by carrying around such a thing? Perhaps not saying anything in particular ...

But seeing him became a koan for me, curious and at first sight irrational, but setting off a series of meditations on different aspects of the picture he presented, a homeless man with a reading lamp at the head of his sleeping bag: light, sight, night, knowledge, reading, poverty, wisdom. It brought to mind a comment attributed to Oscar Wilde, that only what is incredible is worth believing. For what is incredible to the rationalist mind is not incredible to the wider, deeper, richer intellectual mind.

Jesus in the gospel reading today gives us two incredible sayings to disturb our rational minds -

Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

There are some (reading this) who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.

Let these sayings tease us and provoke us, swish them around in our minds for a while, and open the doors of our understanding to new ways of thinking, perhaps to new realities.

Feast of the Transfiguration (Year A) - 6 August

Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 97; 2 Peter 1:16-19; Matthew 17:1-9

We hear about the temptations of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent each year, and we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus on the second Sunday of Lent each year. We also hear about the Transfiguration on the special feast dedicated to that moment and which is celebrated on 6 August. The gospel reading follows the three year Sunday cycle and so this year is the turn of Matthew’s gospel.

It is instructive to think about what each of the evangelists decides to omit and what he decides to include compared with the other two accounts of the same experience. Matthew, for example, does not show Peter and the other two disciples to be quite as dim as they can seem in Luke and Mark. The comment that Peter, always the first to open his mouth, ‘did not know what he was talking about’ is omitted by Matthew. He is generally kinder in his account of the disciples anyway, certainly kinder than Mark who presents them as forever getting the wrong end of the stick.

In this, Matthew’s approach fits with one aspect of what the transfiguration means, that it is a moment of re-assurance for the disciples. It happens, he tells us, ‘six days later’. Six days later than what? Six days after Jesus had told them for the first time that he was to go to Jerusalem, to be rejected and condemned, to suffer and to be put to death. The transfiguration is a moment of re-assurance and encouragement for them to continue following Jesus even in view of what Jesus had begun to teach them about his destiny. It is a divine endorsement of the way Jesus is going and what he is saying about his mission.

The scene is richly loaded with traditional and familiar figures, scenery and texts. Of course the disciples knew who Moses and Elijah were. The scenery – on a mountain, with an overshadowing cloud and a voice – immediately evokes an experience of the divine presence. They surely understood something also of the significance of the words spoken from the cloud. The beloved son with whom God is well pleased, is referred to by Isaiah and others of the prophets. They might well have been familiar also with Moses’ prophecy in the Book of Deuteronomy about a great prophet, whose authority would be comparable to that of Moses himself. ‘Listen to him’, Moses had said, providing words for the divine voice at the transfiguration.

But if the characters and scenery and words of this dramatic moment are all familiar, the meaning of their being brought together in this way, and the one around whom they are brought together, makes of this an experience of something radically new. Although each of its elements is anticipated in the Old Testament, there is nothing quite like it in the Old Testament. What Jesus is helping the disciples to do is to make the transition from the ways in which they understood life and God and themselves up to then to a completely new way of understanding life and God and themselves in the future. The journey they are being asked to take is solidly rooted in all that they had been taught about the God of Israel and yet it is a journey that will transform them completely as regards what they thought and how they lived. It is at once familiar and completely mysterious and for both reasons their fear is understandable.

Related to this is another detail of Matthew’s account, which is not mentioned in either Luke or Mark. Jesus, he tells us, touched them and told them to stand up. They have done what human beings ought to do in the presence of God: bowed down, fallen on their knees, and put their faces to the ground. But the great outcome of the adoration of God, as distinct from the adoration of anything that is less than God, is that we stand up greater for having worshipped.

Whenever we worship something less than God we must hand over some of our identity to that thing. We are then less than we might be for having worshipped an idol. It may be money or power or a group of people or a political ideology or a religious organisation or some vague abstraction– to worship an idol, a false god, always makes us less than what we are. We must pay tribute to whatever it is we worship in that way. We must invest something of ourselves and such false gods have big appetites.

But to adore God does not mean losing anything of our identity. In fact it means the opposite, for we are not rivals to God and God is not a rival to us. To worship God is to live in the truth. This is the reality of our situation, that we are the creatures and servants of God, called to follow the way of His Son. In the presence of God, the Son says to us ‘stand up’. Already we get a glimpse of the greatness that is being revealed, not only the greatness revealed in Jesus but the greatness revealed in Him for us.

Romano Guardini, a theologian working in Berlin at the height of Nazi power there, decided with colleagues and friends to try to disseminate statements to counter-act what was happening. He decided to write first about adoration, for adoration, he says, is ‘the safeguard of our mental health, of our inmost intellectual soundness’. ‘Whenever we adore God’, he writes, ‘something happens within and about us. Things fall into true perspective. Vision sharpens. Much that troubles us rights itself. We distinguish more clearly between good and evil. … We gather strength to meet the demands which life imposes upon us, fortified at the very core of our being, and taking a firmer hold upon truth’.

To fall on our knees before God expresses the truth of our situation. To be enabled to stand up in the presence of the same God, at the invitation of His beloved Son and through His saving work, is the wonderful grace that has been manifested through the appearing of Jesus our Saviour.

Week 18 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 31.1-7; Jeremiah 31.10-13; Matthew 15:21-28

How are we to understand this story in which Jesus is rude to a Canaanite woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon?

There is a feminist interpretation that says that Jesus, as a man, needs to be helped, in particular by the women who come into his life, and that here we see him being helped by the Canaanite woman to realize the full extent of his mission. She calls him, as it were, beyond the boundaries of his own understanding and imagination. We do, often, have difficulty accepting the full humanity of Jesus and what it entailed. We are probably much happier, for example, accepting that Jesus needed to be taught how to pray by Mary and Joseph than we are with the suggestion that he needed to learn something about his mission from the Canaanite woman.

If we work with the belief that Jesus always knew exactly what he was about and always understood what his mission was and how he was to pursue it, how are we to explain the strange conversation that takes place between him and this woman? At first he remains silent (as he did also when confronted with the woman taken in adultery in John 8.) The disciples encourage him to do something for her, though whether this is to help her or just to get rid of her is not clear.

Jesus then makes the statement about being sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Whether he says this to the woman or to the disciples is, once again, not clear. The woman repeats her request: ‘Lord, help me’. Notice that she makes exactly the same prayer as Peter in yesterday’s gospel: ‘Lord, save me’. In situations of great need we don’t need to be told how to pray. Then Jesus makes this strange statement in which he seems to imply that she is a dog, but is immediately taken by her answer about the dogs at least getting the scraps that fall from the master’s table. And so he acknowledges her faith and heals her daughter.

Here’s a suggestion as to what might be going on here. I spent a short time in Trinidad, in the West Indies, but long enough to learn that the people there liked what they call piquant. It is a French word that has hung around in that part of the world and refers to an exchange between people that is witty and clever, moving towards being daring and even (to one who does not understand what is going on) insulting. I can remember one or two conversations of this kind where each party is expected to give as good as he gets – there is excitement and fun in the conversation but an onlooker might not understand what is happening and might even feel uncertain about it.

Might it be that the Canaanite woman and Jesus are immediately attuned to each other – they were able to see each other’s eyes, for example – and that their exchange is of this kind, a kind of verbal sparring that both sides enjoy? They are then enacting a parable for the sake of the disciples in order to teach them something about the universal mission of Jesus.

There is plenty in the prophets about the universal reach of God’s promises to Israel and we cannot imagine that Jesus is unaware of this. The pagans, represented by the woman, will come to the temple – which is now Jesus - and their prayers and sacrifices will be acceptable to the Lord. He quotes this kind of text later in Matthew’s gospel, when he drives the moneychangers out of the Temple and says it is to be a house of prayer for all the peoples.

Jesus in his encounter with the woman takes the opportunity to teach the disciples something about the call of human need, that there is no limit and no boundary to where the light of the gospel and the healing love of Christ are to be brought. Wherever there is human need, charity is to be exercised and the healing power of the gospel made present.

The missionary learns from the missioned if we can put it like that. We might be tempted to think that we know what people need and that we are the ones to provide it. Jesus, remember, does not presume to know that: ‘what do you want me to do for you’ he asks a blind man. The young priests who go out from this community learn what is expected of them from the people who come to them, teaching them the ways in which they expect them to be of service. There must always be this dialogue, between the teacher and the taught, the missionary and the missioned, the helper and the helped. Those we serve help us to realize the gifts with which we have been entrusted. Their need will call us beyond the limits we may have set to what we think we have to offer.

Fergus Kerr OP composed a homily for Torch, the English Dominican website, about this encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. He concludes with this question:

Isn’t this wonderful little story an invitation to reflect on the possibilities of liberation that pagans may hope to find in Christianity, and the necessity, if they are not to be disappointed, that we Christians discover possibilities in ourselves that call us beyond our inherited boundaries?

Week 18 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 30.1-2, 12-15, 18-22; Psalm 102; Matthew 15.1-2, 10-14

Out of the crisis of the Exile comes relief. The Lord acknowledges the pain his providence has inflicted on his people, but now it is time for reconciliation, restoration and renewal. When all is said and done the 'bottom line' is the one that is, literally, the bottom line of today's first reading: 'you shall be my people, and I will be your God'.

The gospel reading reminds us that our relationship with God is always in danger of slipping. Jesus is just as severe in his criticism of the Pharisees - blind guides leading the blind - as the Lord is in his description of the wound he has inflicted on his people.

Job struggled with the mystery of God's purpose in a philosophical way. He submitted his thoughts and feelings to the consideration of his friends but always remaining committed to the truth that he knew. He was not going to let God off the hook but instead called on God to share his own truth with him. Which he did - 'I am God, the one who is, and you are Job, the one who is not'. The words are not exactly those we find in the book of Job, they come rather from God speaking to Catherine of Siena, but they apply just as much to Job's situation as to hers.

It is the mystery at the heart of all dark nights - we know our sins and we know God's goodness, we know suffering and we know consolation, we know our weakness and we know what we desire, we know our longing to love and we know God's love for us. And still, trying to put together all those things we know, the elements of that equation which unites us with God, remains a quandary for us. It cannot be resolved philosophically, it seems. It leads inevitably to the cross of Jesus and his mystery.

That is where this quandary is at its most intense. That is where we see human sin and divine love exposed to our gaze as never before and as nowhere else. It is what comes from inside that matters, he says in today's gospel. From the heart exposed by human sin on Calvary comes the assurance of divine love, even in our darkest night, even in spite of our most serious sins, even when all seems lost. The Lord hears the groaning of the imprisoned and releases those doomed to die. But he does that not by helping them to avoid death but by bringing them beyond it to new life, to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

Week 18 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 28.1-17; Psalm 119.29,43,79,80,95,102; Matthew 14.22-36

Sometimes the only thing people see in this event is Jesus walking on the sea as if it is some kind of trick, a piece of magic to impress people. (Sometimes it is the same with the sign given at Cana, as if that too were just a magical trick.) But that means missing so much of what this very rich text contains. Because what Matthew gives us is a theophany or more precisely a ‘Christophany’. Those terms mean a revelation of the power and presence of God, a revelation of the power and presence of God in Christ. In fact this moment belongs with the baptism, the transfiguration and the resurrection appearances as one of the key moments in which the glory of Christ is revealed to his disciples.

Looking back, there are so many echoes in this text of the great theophanies of the Old Testament. There is a mountain and roaring waters and wind. There is fear as nature is churned up by the presence of God. Those called to be close to God (Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, for example) experience perplexity and terror in the presence of the glory of the Lord. Psalm 77 speaks of the power and presence of God in a way that is strikingly echoed in Matthew 14:

Your ways, O God, are holy. / What God is great as our God?

You are the God who works wonders. / You showed your power among the peoples.

Your strong arm redeemed your people, / The sons of Jacob and Joseph.

The waters saw you, O God, / The waters saw you and trembled;

The depths were moved with terror. / The clouds poured down rain,

The skies sent forth their voice; / Your arrows flashed to and fro.

Your thunder rolled round the sky, / Your flashes lighted up the world.

The earth was moved and trembled / When your way led through the sea,

Your path through the mighty waters / And no one saw your footprints.

Your guided your people like a flock / By the hand of Moses and Aaron.

If there are echoes from the Old Testament in this event there are also premonitions of what is yet to be revealed about Jesus – the transfiguration, on another mountain, also provoking fear, and especially the appearances of the risen Lord. In those appearances we also find the disciples, the boat, the lake, difficulty on the lake, the appearance of Jesus and their wondering whether it is a ghost, his words of reassurance: take heart, do not be afraid, it is I, ego eimi in Greek, the divine name of Exodus 3, ‘do not be afraid for I AM’.

There is something satisfying, for us, in this way of God showing his presence and his power. To shake the building, to unsettle creation, to come with noise and fire and wind and smoke … this seems like how a proper god will reveal himself. But we believe that the Christophany, the revelation of the power of God in Christ, comes to its fulfillment on another mountain, the mountain of Calvary, where our God reveals his power in powerlessness, weakness and failure. We are happier with a God who would throw his weight around, who would fill us with fear. We find it much more difficult to understand a God who is love because we know less about love than we do about fear. But this is our faith, that the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the weakness and foolishness of the cross, that it is there that God’s power is most clearly seen and it is seen to be the power of love alone.

In this moment, Peter is like Thomas later, he wants some kind of proof or evidence that it really is Jesus. When Jesus asks him why he doubted is he referring to Peter’s loss of confidence on the water (his inability to do ‘the trick’) or, more likely, is he asking him why he doubted that Jesus would be present to the Church in its hour of difficulty. This event, this story, is an encouragement to the Church, to Christians at all times, to trust that Christ is nearby and his hand is always ready to reach out to save us. Peter then does not need to consult a book about prayer to know what he should say. He does not need to track down a wise man or woman to teach him how to pray. In situations of real need we know exactly what to pray for and we simply ask for it.

The gospel reading thus re-assures us that Christ is with us, always, in personal or shared difficulty, and we are not to be afraid. The hand of Christ is held out to us at all times. It is there in the Word of God nourishing us from day to day. It is there in the sacraments of the Church when we are fed and strengthened by the life of Christ. And it is there in each other, each of us a ‘Christ’ to the other, our neighbour, not far away, someone we ought to be able to turn to and say ‘help me, I’m sinking’. Each of us has been conformed to Christ in his dying and his rising and so we bear the Word and the Spirit for one another, as compassionate companions in the calms and in the storms of life.

Week 18 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 144; Romans 8:35,37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Some years ago the Christian community of Mosul in Iraq was obliged to make a stark choice: either pay a tax in order to live in an Islamic state, go away with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, or stay and be killed with the sword. This is not a story from ancient times or from the middle ages, it happened just a few years ago. The vast majority decided to go away with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. The people they were dealing with had already shown that they meant business, having slaughtered their way through Syria and across northern Iraq. For the Christians of Mosul it meant walking up to forty kilometres across the desert, carrying their children, until they found a place of safety, arriving tired, thirsty, hungry and, one can imagine, deeply sad. A whole civilization and culture which had survived so many things across the centuries may now have been destroyed forever.

Suddenly the world seems to be very insecure and full of great political and physical dangers. Not just in Iraq. The normal decencies of civilized living seem to be suspended as people act and react out of fear, humiliation and hatred. Every situation is being exploited by people gripped by fear, hatred and violence. Politicians in different parts of the world are building their power by playing to people's fears, hatreds and humiliations. The normal decencies that used to guide debate and discussion seem to have fallen away as people take to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the other social media to attack, mock, decry, complain and protest. Some of this is very good and necessary but much of it is done in language that is itself violent, humiliating, dismissive, disrespectful. Fear, hatred, violence seem to be the things dominating world affairs at the moment. And put with all of that the massive question of migration in the world, the normal problems, so to speak, of famine, thirst and disease, and the many other tragedies cutting across people's lives and leaving them permanently wounded ...

A great feeling of impotence and irrelevance might well overtake us as we try to reflect on scripture texts and wonder what the Christian faith can offer in such circumstances. Is God not just Santa Claus for grown ups, the wishful thinking that there is, as today's psalm says, a God of great kindness who is good to all and near to everyone who calls on Him? Against a strengthening chorus of agnosticism and atheism the Church's voice seems feeble, unrealistic, even at times hypocritical. Many good and intelligent young people have decided they do not want to stay with what the Christian faith teaches: it seems to them, at least in the way the Church lives it, unintelligent and morally bankrupt.

Jesus can sometimes be presented as a kind of Santa Claus for grown ups but we must always remember that his engagement with the world ended in failure. He was not able to answer the world's problems. He was not the solution to the world's problems. They are as bad, if not worse, than they were before He came. In the face of fear, hatred and violence, he too was powerless and he died as just one more innocent victim of those forces. Today's gospel reading reminds us of this: 'when Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist', it begins. This is a turning point in his ministry, a defining moment as we say nowadays. He saw clearly what his destiny too was likely to be. John had died protesting at injustice. Jesus will die preaching the kingdom he had come to establish, the project of his life, it seems, unsuccessful.

The first thing the readings ask of us today is that we listen and look, heedfully and hopefully, to the generosity of God. And that we continue to do this no matter how bleak and dark the circumstances become. 'I will renew with you the everlasting covenant' - so the voice of God, barely heard perhaps, but distinct and certain, whispered in the desert, sounding in the night, patient and persistent in spite of the agitation of fear, the restlessness of hatred, and the screaming fury of violence. Under the shadow of the looming cross, Jesus is moved with pity for the people and goes on doing for them what he has done in more promising times: healing them, feeding them, teaching them.

The outcome is in the hands of God, times and hours known only to the Father. John the Baptist remains faithful in his campaign for justice and accepts death without knowing whether that death will be remembered or how that death might contribute, if at all, to the good of the world. Jesus remains faithful in his mission of preaching the kingdom, engaging with the forces of evil that are attacking the lives of the people. But his engagement with them is not on their ground but on his. His are not the weapons of fear, hatred and violence, for to fight those things with those things is to descend ever further into the abyss.

Paul's extraordinary litany at the end of Romans 8, today's second reading, makes what might seem like an absurd claim, that we are more than conquerors, that we conquer overwhelmingly. Faced with the powerful forces of the world - anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword, death, life, angels, principalities, present things, future things, powers, height, depth, anything at all in creation - any of this, all of this, loses its power, because none of it can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That whispering voice - 'I will renew with you the everlasting covenant', 'I have loved you with an everlasting love' - penetrates through all these things.

That love, poured into our hearts, will of course move people to work for solutions, for political and economic solutions to the problems that are destroying people's lives. Man does not live on bread alone but he does live on bread. The gift of God is an enabling gift, not a soothing cream to take the sting out of human life, but an empowering gift. 'Give them some food yourselves', Jesus says to the disciples when they come whinging to him. The miracle happens in such a way that it might seem as if the disciples themselves have worked it, it allows the bounty to appear to come from them: there was one basket of scraps for each of the apostles. The gift is within our efforts for this is how grace works, a power which enables our efforts from beginning to end.

Listen heedfully and look hopefully to the generosity of God. He is the creator who wants things to be and who sees them as very good. He is the redeemer who wants our salvation and who renews with us the everlasting covenant. The kingdom does not consist in food and drink, nor does it consist in political and military strategies. The kingdom means righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That Spirit is given when Jesus is glorified and Jesus is glorifed through his failure, his death at the hands of fear, hatred and violence. He is the Victor, our Champion, and Conqueror, not in the terms and categories of the world, but in a new way, in a new world, in a kingdom that is as yet still coming.