Saint Mark - 25 April

Readings: 1 Peter 5:5b-14; Psalm 89; Mark 16:15-20

There is a striking phrase about preaching in today's Office of Readings. Because the wisdom of the world has not helped people to find their way to God, it says, God decided to use 'that foolish thing, our preaching' as a way of bringing people to salvation.

Our preaching is foolish for many reasons. There is our ignorance and our sinfulness, with which we are all too familiar, and which are permanent obstacles to any understanding and to any effort at teaching others.

Both Mass readings speak about demons and devils abroad in the world. When we reflect on the apparent power of these demons then the foolishness of what we are trying to do is further highlighted. The first reading speaks of the devil prowling round like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. If such a beast were in the house we would be well aware of his presence. And often the demons are noisy and boisterous. They shout and make a fuss. 'Jesus', they shout, 'what have you got to do with us?' It means that some demons are easily identified even if we are not quite sure how to handle them. Their noisy presence is undeniable and we are rightly afraid of their violence.

Other demons act more quietly, more subtly. The gospel reading speaks of disciples picking up snakes and drinking poison, as well as casting out demons and speaking in tongues. Snakes and poison work silently but they are as deadly, perhaps more deadly, than the noisy demons. They can be more difficult to recognise, in time to take action against them.

So we face into the world ignorant and sinful, and we face into a world that is often cleverer and more well informed than we are. We do so knowing that both we and the world are afflicted and struggling with demons of different kinds.

The monastic tradition identified seven major demons and recognised also that the noisier ones are more easily seen. Think of lust, for example, or gluttony, or anger. They are honest vices, we can say, they come out into the open. It does not mean they are easy to manage but at least we know where we stand.

The subtler demons like pride and envy are much more difficult to manage, even sometimes to acknowledge, but their consequences for ourselves and for any living together can be much more serious than anything the honest vices can do.

Where does it leave us? Well both readings also speak today of the Lord confirming the preaching of the disciples. In the first reading we are told the Lord will strengthen, confirm and support us. And the gospel reading tells us that the Lord worked with the preachers of the gospel, confirming their words by signs.

In a seminar I lead on the history and spirituality of preaching one of the big questions that emerges is this: what are the signs that would confirm our preaching? Obviously unusual phenomena like those listed at the end of Mark 16 might work in that way. But the readings point us in another direction. They point us towards humility, patience and charity. Here is the most effective sign of the way of life that we preach. Where a Christian community is living in humility, patience and charity, we have the most convincing sign that here are people who practise what they preach, who believe what they say, who witness to the fact that the Lord is risen and is with them to support, strengthen and confirm.

The preachers of the gospel take on the world with that foolish thing, their preaching. They do it, obviously, not because of anything they find in themselves capable of overcoming the demons that gather round. They do it on the strength of their faith that the Lord is forever with them, and that he will confirm their words with signs, sometimes with strange and unusual events, more often than not through the witness of a community living the life of His Spirit.

Easter Week 4 Wednesday

Readings: Acts 12:24-13:5; Psalm 66 (67); John 12:44-50

So are the apostles coming or going? There are times when they do not know themselves, for the mission is being directed by the Holy Spirit and they are simply his assistants, being sent here and there according to his inspirations.

It is not helpful that a whole chapter, in which many things happen, is omitted between the first reading of yesterday's Mass and the first reading today. What, for example, is the 'relief mission' which Barnabas and Saul complete before returning to Jerusalem? It can only be the task they were given by the church in Antioch to bring help to the community in Jerusalem (Acts 11:30). Which means they should here be returning from Jerusalem, not going up to it! Some translations make the correction. It seems that the manuscript tradition of the New Testament is itself confused, does not know whether the apostles were coming or going! What seems more logical, reading all of chapters 11 and 12, is to take it that here they return from Jerusalem to Antioch, having completed the task for which they were sent to the 'mother church'.

We are then given more information about the life of the first Christians at Antioch. The teachers mentioned represent various nationalities and social strata (a friend of Herod, no less!) so that it is a fairly mixed, not to say eccentric, group. Barnabas and Saul are still listed in that order but within a few verses Saul will become Paul and the mission on which the Spirit sends them will become that of 'Paul and his company'. It is a very significant change in leadership roles.

What keeps the mission on track, however, is neither the prudence of Barnabas nor the zeal of Paul but the guidance of the Holy Spirit, sought in prayer and revealed to the community (unfortunately we are not told how precisely this revelation was given and received). What is most important is that the word of God continues to spread and to gain followers: that is the goal of the mission, the purpose of the Holy Spirit.

In our own efforts at responding to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit there are times when we do not know whether we are coming or going, whether we are moving forwards or backwards, whether we are acting wisely or foolishly. We can of course imitate the first Christians of Antioch and ask in prayer for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We can seek to respond to his inspirations as best we discern them, trusting that what then comes about is within God's plan, that it serves the spreading of God's word.

The gospel reading links easily with this, for Jesus talks there in similar terms: he has come to speak the word which he has received from the Father, this is the purpose for which the Father sent him into the world. This word of the Father, spoken by Jesus, stands as the judge of human lives, of all coming and going, of all progress and of all action. There is no need for anything further. The word itself will be our judge such that how we position ourselves in relation to that word is also our judgement, the criterion of our faithfulness.

Jesus comes and goes, he goes and comes. The apostles the same. The important thing is the spreading of the word under the guidance of the Spirit. When we look at the state of the Church we might wonder whether any effective witness is being given today. Are we coming or going? Are we on the way up or the way down? Are we too mixed, too diffuse, too divided, too eccentric? How can we hope to offer any secure and reliable judgement about things?

But the priorities remain the same and life continues on the two levels we have often seen in these weeks after Easter. There is the human level, what we do and what we think we are doing. But there is also the level of divine inspiration and guidance, what falls within the deliberate intention and foreknowledge of God, the ways in which our comings and goings serve the building up of God's kingdom. Prayer and the support of others are within our capacity. We trust that through these actions of ours the Spirit will continued to guide us, that even in spite of us the Word of God will continue to spread in the world and to gain faithful followers.

Easter Week 4 Tuesday

Readings: Acts 11:19-26; Psalm 87; John 10:22-30 

While the first reading is taking us forward, on into the developing life of the Church, the gospel reading seems to take us backwards, to a moment before the death and resurrection of Jesus, when he was still arguing with 'the Jews' about who he was.

Barnabas is the key figure in the development of the Church at Antioch. He is trusted by the community at Jerusalem to go to Antioch and to see how the integration of 'the Greeks' is going there. It seems that some of the first preachers restricted their preaching to Jews while others were open to Gentiles also. Such openness seems to have been the strength of the community at Antioch. Barnabas sees for himself that God is giving grace there. 

More than that, he is moved by what he now sees at Antioch to go looking for Saul, who some time before had retreated to Tarsus, his home town. Saul seems to have lived a quiet life there for a number of years. His biographers propose that he spent the time in prayer and study: Tarsus was an important academic centre.

In the meantime, according to Acts 9-11, Peter and the Jerusalem community were learning important lessons about the universal mission of the Church: that God shows no partiality, that the Gentiles also were receiving the word of God, that the gift of the Holy Spirit was being poured out even on the Gentiles. The apostles were seeing these things, interpreting and discerning them under the guidance of the same Spirit.

At Antioch Barnabas puts the pieces together: the time is ripe to bring Saul back into the story. You will remember that Saul's preaching at Damascus and Jerusalem had provoked anger and opposition in both places, with Jews in one and Hellenists in the other. So he went to Tarsus and things calmed down.

But Barnabas, a good man filled with the Holy Spirit and faith, and also, it seems, a man of exceptional intuition and prudence, recognised Saul's gift, was even perhaps given an insight into the mission he was to have as 'Saint Paul'. He brought Saul back and they worked together in Antioch for a year before undertaking a missionary journey across Asia Minor. Together they built up the community of people who were now, for the first time, called Christians. It is one reason why some regard Saul/Paul as the founder of the religion that came to be known as 'Christianity'.

The gospel reading today is sombre by contrast. 'You do not believe because you are no sheep of mine', Jesus says to the Jews who are questioning him. His words and the signs he has worked in the Father's name should have been enough to convince them. 'Tell us plainly', they say. 'I have told you', he says, 'and my works confirm it'. It seems they do not believe because they do not belong to Jesus' flock. We might have wished it the other way round: you do not belong to my flock because you do not believe. So believe and belong. But as Jesus expresses it, it seems more like his choice than theirs: if you belonged to my flock you would believe. But you do not belong and so you do not believe.

Is their situation irreversible?  So much of the gospel and the rest of the New Testament tells us that it cannot be so. So how do we come to belong to Jesus' flock so that we might believe his words and his works? We must listen to his voice and follow him: this is the message of Jesus in the gospel reading. This is how to belong to him and come to believe. We must pray for God's grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, listen to his voice in that way: this is the message of the first reading. It is the Holy Spirit, working through the words and works of preachers and witnesses, who builds up the Church in every generation, forming good men and women to belong to the Lord's flock, whose faith will entitle them to be called 'Christians'.

Easter Week 4 Monday (Years B and C)

Readings: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 41/42; John10:1-10

The last line of today’s gospel is sometimes lifted out and held up as a kind of summary proclamation of the mission of Jesus: ‘I have come that they may have life and have it to the full’. But it raises at least these two questions: what kind of life is life to the full, and how does it come to be in us?

The life Jesus speaks about is his risen life, the life of the new creation that has been established through his resurrection from the dead. We know that this is in some ways a continuation of human life and in other ways a radical transformation of human life. In their encounters with the Risen Lord, the disciples learned that there was continuity and discontinuity between his condition before his death and his condition after his resurrection, between the human being alive in the first creation and the human being alive in the new creation.

God is always the source of life and goodness. All life, all holiness comes from God through the Son in the Holy Spirit: so we say in the liturgy. Peter has a vision of all sorts of living things, animals and wild beasts, and a voice from heaven certifies them to be ‘clean’. The new creation, then, does not mean despising the old one: ‘what God has made clean, you have no right to call profane’. Peter’s vision, followed by a visit from three men, is reminiscent of the experience of Abraham at the oak of Mamre when three men came to assure him of God’s continuing presence and care in the unfolding of creation.

The history of creation now flows through the gate of the paschal mystery. This is the dramatic new development that has come about through the death and resurrection of Jesus. So what kind of life is life to the full, the life that flows through the gate of the paschal mystery? It is a life lived in the Spirit of Jesus: ‘the Holy Spirit came down on them in the same way as it came down on us in the beginning’, Peter says. Life in the Spirit means a life completely centred on Christ and on his work, a life of joy and courage in following Christ and witnessing to him. So we can begin to list the characteristics of life to the full: appreciating God’s work in creation, attending to God’s voice in prayer, recognising the voice of Christ the good shepherd, turning away from stealing, killing, and destroying.

Life to the full also means freely going in and out, sure of finding pasture. This rhythm of life seems to speak about contemplation and action, part of this life spent with Christ in the safety of the sheepfold, another part following him out of the sheepfold to do the many things involved in mission: searching for the lost, caring for the weak, witnessing to Christ, bringing his presence to every place, calling others to attend to his voice and to learn from him.

Life to the full means dissolving barriers such as that between Jews and Gentiles: ‘so you have been visiting the uncircumcised and eating with them, have you’, is a criticism of Peter when he returns to Judaea. So much of the teaching and example of Jesus is about the dissolution of barriers. Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? Prostitutes enter the kingdom of heaven before the righteous. Many will come from east and west, north and south, to sit at table in his kingdom. We still long for this universal inclusiveness to be completed and the Church itself struggles, as we see it did from the beginning, to understand how it should bear witness in its own life to this universal inclusiveness.

So life to the full appreciates creation, attends to God’s voice, recognises the voice of Christ, turns away from wicked things, is contemplative and active, dissolves barriers between people: this is life in the Spirit of Jesus.

How do we come to live by this new life: this was our second question. At the end of today’s first reading the Church in Judaea surprises itself by saying ‘God can evidently grant even the pagans the repentance that leads to life’. The Spirit of life to the full clearly works beyond the barriers and limitations we will be inclined to set for it. Even while they express admiration for God’s ability to bring the pagans to repentance, they seem for the moment unaware of the fact that God has done exactly the same with them. They have been brought to change their minds, to repent of how they formerly thought about things, so as to open themselves further to the new thing God is doing within the creation.

The simple answer to our second question, then – how do we come to live by this new life? – is: repentance, changing our minds, thinking in a new way. It is always easier for us to see how other people need to change their minds than to see how we need to change our minds. But we have life to the full only when we have, as Saint Paul says, come to share the mind of Christ. We can begin to practise those virtues that characterise life to the full: appreciating creation, attending to God’s voice, recognising the voice of Christ, turning away from wicked things, being contemplative and active, dissolving the barriers that keep us from others.

The danger here is that such a list of virtues will begin to seem moralistic and effortful, as if life to the full were not also, as all life is, a gift granted to us.

On the other hand we cannot simply say ‘sorry, I have not received this gift’. Life to the full, the life of the new creation, is also continuous with the life of the first creation, and so we will find in ourselves intimations and longings that already draw us towards it, prepare us for it, and give us already, however faintly, some understanding of what love, joy, courage and peace might mean.

In today’s psalm the deer that yearns for running streams represents the soul thirsting for God: ‘when can I enter and see the face of God, the God of my life?’ ‘Send forth your light and your truth’, the psalmist says, a prayer we believe to be answered in the sending of the Son. ‘Let these be my guide’ – we recognise in the voice of Christ God’s light and truth leading and guiding us. ‘Let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.’ This is the Church, the sign and presence already of life to the full, where the mysteries of the gate are celebrated, the paschal mysteries of death and new life.

The first creation teaches us to yearn for life to the full. The new creation brings that life to us, healing the wounds of the first creation and fulfilling our desire for life in ways that are unexpected, radically transforming.

Easter Week 4 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Acts 4:8-12; Psalm 117; 1 John3:1-2; John 10:11-18

We have already received so much. We have been introduced to Jesus and have been given the name which is above all other names. We have been adopted as children of God, sons and daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of Christ. We have been called to belong to his sheepfold: he has called us by name, we belong to him, hear his voice and he leads us out. It is a matter then of knowledge, love and unity. These are themes in the readings of today’s Mass.

It is a bit of a cliché that we are all supposed to be mortally offended at being compared to sheep. Preachers often begin their preaching on today, Good Shepherd Sunday, by rehearsing this cliché. Offended though we may be, it remains very difficult to stand up and to stand out from the crowd where courage is needed and we fear that others will be offended or angered by what we have to say. We can always take the comparison with sheep this way: we are creatures that need to be cared for, comforted, protected, ministered to in various ways. If we decide that we are not creatures who are needy in these ways then there are consequences, not only psychological but spiritual.

A renewal programme in ministry and theology used to invite participants to take it in order to ‘minister to yourself’. But this is precisely what we cannot do. We need humility to allow ourselves to be ministered to, we need the openness to receive and to accept what others have to offer us.

The kind of life we are now speaking about consists in knowledge, love and unity. These are the themes of the Good Shepherd discourse.  ‘I know my own and mine know me’, Jesus says, ‘just as I know the Father and the Father knows me’. ‘I lay down my life for my sheep – greater love has no man than this’ and ‘having loved his own, he loved them to the end’. ‘That they may be one’, he prays in John 17, that the scattered sheep may be brought back into unity, all of humanity (all those ‘other sheep that are not of this flock’) are to be brought into unity.

We have already received so much and so are not only sheep needing to be cared for but also, at the same time, shepherds entrusted with the care of others. It is the calling of each person who follows Christ, of everyone who belongs to the priestly people. What we normally refer to as the ministerial priesthood is there not just for practical reasons but in order to give us sacramental signs within the community of knowledge, love and unity, signs that this life of the community is not natural but supernatural.

Easter Week 3 Thursday

Readings: Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 66; John 6:44-51

The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are two parts of the same work, interrupted in our Bibles by the Gospel of John. So in fact, in this great two part work, the account of Stephen's death comes just eight chapters after the account of Jesus' death. We have seen how the trial and execution of Stephen mirror in so many ways the experience of Jesus. Similarly just eight chapters after the account of Jesus' appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus comes the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch whom he ends up baptising.

Similarly there are striking similarities between the events recorded in Luke 24 and those recounted in Acts 8. The protagonists are on the road away from Jerusalem. In each case we find a person or persons musing about God's dealings with the world. In each case we find a person or persons puzzled, to say the least, by the 'suffering servant'. He and they are wondering who this figure might be, what God could possibly be doing through him, The two disciples on the road to Emmaus thought he would be the one to redeem Israel. The Ethiopian is completely at a loss.

In each case the traveller or travellers are joined by a stranger who, beginning from a text, 'explains' the suffering of the Christ for them. In Luke 24 and Acts 8 we have a liturgy of the word leading to the celebration of a sacrament. In the gospel it is the breaking of bread, the moment in which the two disciples recognise Jesus, just as he is taken from them. In Acts it is the baptism of the Ethiopian - 'what is to prevent me being baptised?' (which has the ring of a question from an early Christian liturgy). The two sacraments are the ways in which those who have come to believe may participate in the paschal mystery of Christ, identify with it and make it their own. Baptism is the sacrament in which faith in that mystery is first bestowed, just as it conforms the baptised person to Christ in his dying and rising from the dead. And just as Jesus disappears in the moment in which he is recognised so Philip disappears after the baptism and the Ethiopian sees him no more.

Applying all this to our own experience we can say at least this much: that our liturgies and sacramental celebrations are similarly structured. There is a liturgy of the word followed by a celebration of the sacrament. We too need the riches of the scriptures to be opened up for us just as we need our hearts, minds and eyes to be opened to the presence of Christ with us. Just as for these first believers, the suffering of the Christ remains at the heart of things: 'was it not written that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?' Had he not said (today's gospel reading) that the bread he would give would be his flesh, for the life of the world?

We continue to need help, whatever the direction in which we are travelling, whatever our perplexity or puzzlement. We have not yet entered fully into the mystery of the cross which remains a stumbling block and a folly. But whatever road we are on, whatever questioning we have, however far we might be from the destination, the Spirit seeks us out. He will find ways to assure us of the presence of Christ, help us to understand the mystery of His love, lead us to a deeper experience of the mysteries we celebrate in our liturgies and which we seek to live out in our lives.

Easter Week 3 Wednesday

Readings: Acts 8:1b-8; Psalm 66; John 6:35-40

Not for the last time we hear of external events that, in spite of themselves and even contrary to their explicit purpose, favour the spread of the gospel. Whether it is persecution, as here, or resistance and indifference, arguments among the preachers themselves, or the need to recover from a bruising encounter - there are many extraneous things that result in great leaps forward in the preaching of the gospel. Scattering because of the persecution that breaks out in Jerusalem after the martyrdom of Stephen, a persecution whose most energetic promoter is Saul, the Christian preachers go to different parts of the Holy Land and so fulfil the second part of the prediction Jesus made at the beginning of Acts: 'you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth' (1:8)

Part of the original preaching of the apostles is that even the decisions and actions of the enemies of Jesus were used by God to achieve the purpose which had always been within God's intention. He sent the Son into the world because he loved it so much, so that everyone who believes in him might not be lost but might have eternal life. The Son is to lose nothing of what has been entrusted to him but is to raise it on the last day. These divine purposes are achieved through the events of the passion and death of Jesus, which seemed to bring an end to his mission and were designed by human agents to do precisely that, but which in fact were the means God used to bring that mission to its fulfillment.

So parts of John 6, such as the section we hear today, can seem to be not only about the Eucharist but about the whole event of the birth and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is as it should be because the Eucharist contains the entire mystery of the Incarnation. The Eucharist is, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, 'the source and summit of the Christian life', that from which everything flows and that to which everything flows. An earlier writer, commenting on John 6, puts it this way:

'Even if it were true that this chapter [John 6] does not refer to the Eucharist but to the whole work of Christ whose Incarnation feeds the souls of men, it nevertheless shows the place of the Eucharist in Christianity just as strongly as if its referenece were more directly Eucharistic. For the language of 'bread' and 'eating' and of 'blood' and 'drinking' is the Christian's Eucharistic language, and to express the Incarnation in the language of the Eucharist betokens the importance of the rite just as emphatically as to express the Eucharist in terms of the Incarnation' (A.M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, New York 1936, p.106).

In his commentary on John 6 Thomas Aquinas says similar things. As he puts it more succinctly in his antiphon for the feast of Corpus Christi, in the Eucharist we receive the whole mystery of Christ, we renew the memory of his passion, our souls are filled with grace, and we receive a pledge of eternal glory. In other words the entire work of the Incarnation is contained in the Eucharist - the Word becoming flesh to reveal the Father to us, the Son sent from the Father to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away, the Risen Lord recognised in the breaking of the bread. All of this is contained in the Eucharist, to human eyes a simple and routine ritual of readings, prayers and actions, but for those who believe the sacred banquet in which we feast on Jesus, our bread of life and our living bread.