Week 28 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 5:18-25; Psalm 1; Luke 11:42-46

There is a beautiful image in today's responsorial psalm. The one who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it is like a tree planted by the water's edge. He yields fruit in due season, his leaves never fade, and all he does prospers. Such a person has well-placed roots. The spring of life and energy and action in her is healthy and reliable and fruitful.

St Paul knew this psalm very well. He is the most famous Pharisee to come to faith in Jesus and what he says about the law and the Spirit is therefore of great interest. He contrasts them, yes, but not as two alternative codes of law, one detailed and negative, the other general and positive. It is rather that any person's ability to keep the law of God - which we all ought to do - depends on his or her being planted in the Spirit, rooted in that divine gift of living water. Paul had come to realise that the positive fruits of the law could only be borne by people living in the Spirit. The law is good and wise and true as he says elsewhere. But without the Spirit any effort to live by the law will be 'fleshly', it will inevitably be partial and external, selective and more or less hypocritical.

It can be tempting to set up an easy opposition between 'old testament law' and 'new testament spirit'. But to give in to this tempation would be a very serious misunderstanding of the gospel, and of the whole history of salvation. The new law is not an alternative to the old law but is its full flourishing. The new law, of which the prophets already spoke, is the life of the faithful believer flowing from his or her communion with the Lord, the God of Israel. What will secure that communion for us?

Jesus himself warns us off this facile opposition through a couple of clues in today's gospel reading. 'These you should have done', he says, referring to justice and the love of God, 'without overlooking the others', those more minor matters of the law which the faithful person will also want to observe, because they are part of God's law.

The second clue comes in his response to the lawyer. 'You impose on people burdens too hard to carry', Jesus says. The yoke or burden is another image for God's law which guides the steps of the one who submits to it. In Matthew's gospel Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden (same term as here) is light. What makes it an easy yoke? That is does not ask very much of us? What makes it a light burden? That its demands are superficial and not radical? He is speaking of the cross and walking behind him on that way. So too is Paul in Galatians: 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world' (6:14). He speaks of crucifixion in today's first reading also, another warning against any understanding of Christian discipleship that would under-estimate its costliness.

The tree by the water's edge is the cross of Christ planted in our earth. Just down the road from where I now live is the church of San Clemente with its renowned mosaic of the cross as the tree of life. This dry and dead wood, irrigated by the blood of the one dying upon it, becomes a living tree from which flows the water of the river of life, the gift of the Spirit, the sacramental life of the Church. This is the light and eternally fruitful burden we are asked to accept and to carry. Its power reaches the depths of our hearts, irrigating the dry and dead places,  filling us with its own love. That love is the Holy Spirit who enables us to observe the law of God and so to bear the fruit of the cross: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against which there is no law, but which are the fulfillment of the law of God, God's intention for His people.

Week 28 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 5:1-6; Psalm 118; Luke 11:37-41

What Jesus says to the Pharisee is a bit obscure: 'as to what is within, give alms': that's the translation to which you are referred here. But what can that mean? 'Give alms from what you have' is another translation but it says nothing really: from what else could one give alms? The proper translation seems to be 'give for alms those things that are within'. It fits with what Jesus is saying about the outside and the inside. It also links neatly with what Paul says in the first reading: what counts is not circumcision or uncircumcision - things external - but 'faith working through love'.

We are being asked to give of ourselves, then, and of our deepest selves, sharing what we think, how we feel, what we believe, what it is we value. What is within must be purified in the first place, Jesus says: what we think, how we feel, what we believe, what it is we value. There are many practical consequences once we begin to consider the fantasies that occupy our minds, the disortions that trouble our feelings, the questions that challenge our faith, the ambivalences that leave our hearts divided.

The way to this purification is not simply through asceticism and willpower. It is through remaining in the company of Christ, living by His Spirit, continuing to seek the freedom for which He has set us free. The way is through prayer, that which is most within in any human being, the only place from which our faith can work through our love.

Week 28 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 4:22-24, 26-27, 31-5:1; Psalm 113;  Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? For Luke, it is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites that is the sign for those listening to Jesus. The Queen of Sheba came to hear Solomon’s wisdom and the people of Nineveh heard Jonah’s preaching. There is something here greater than either Jonah or Solomon. You ought, then, to listen to him, to Jesus, to live by his wisdom, and to answer his call to repentance.

In Matthew, Jesus brings in the earlier part of Jonah’s adventures and points to his three days in the belly of the fish. This is the sign of Jonah, according to Matthew, a foreshadowing of the three days Jesus would spend lying dead in the tomb. Matthew’s account gives us the stronger imagery and we may be tempted to assume that Luke implies the same thing. There are few biblical images more powerful than that of Jonah in the belly of the great fish.

But there is no indication that the Ninevites knew anything about the fish! For Luke, the sign is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people. And this clears the way for us to notice something else in Jonah’s experience at Nineveh. Not only do the people repent, but God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them. God’s repentance displeased Jonah exceedingly, we are told, and he was angry.

When Jesus directed his listeners to the sign of Jonah it has to be that the divine mercy shown there is uppermost in his mind. He has come, after all, to show us the Father. The repentance of God in the Book of Jonah anticipates so many of the parables of Jesus in which the justice of God becomes puzzling because swallowed up in God’s mercy. If we feel a bit angry at the prodigal son, or the eleventh-hour labourers who are paid the same as those who worked all day, or at the thought of prostitutes and other public sinners entering the kingdom of heaven before us, then we are in the company of Jonah.

He felt used by God. His mission was a complete success, the whole city repented at his preaching, and still he was angry. This, then, is the sign of Jonah. In calling us to repentance, God is asking us to become like Him. He is always ready to be merciful, to turn towards us. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son, the first sign of repentance from the sinner wins God’s attention and mercy. (In fact we believe it would not even be possible without God’s prior attention and mercy.)

The freedom of heaven, of which Paul speaks in the first reading, is seen in God's freedom and extravagant generosity which so annoy Jonah. Grace is not confined and those who are called to be preachers of grace must never forget it. The servant of the Word is always at God's disposal, doing only his duty, preaching the call to repentance and the coming of the kingdom. There is no neat measure of the effectiveness of that preaching, no way of predicting what its results might be.

For freedom Christ has set you free, Paul says elsewhere in Galatians. As followers of Jesus we are messengers of that freedom, servants doing our duty, instruments in whatever way God judges best in alerting others to the freedom God has promised.

Week 28 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 25.6-10a; Psalm 22/23; Philippians 4.12-14,19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

The readings build a beautiful picture of God’s universal and extravagant love. What God wants is the salvation of all people. The celebration of this divine love is described by the prophet Isaiah as a wonderful banquet – the best of wine, the best of food, plenty for everybody. The responsorial psalm is along the same lines. The Lord is our shepherd who takes care of us especially when we find ourselves in dark places and who has prepared a banquet for us. Goodness and kindness will follow us all the days of our life and then, at the end, we shall dwell in the Lord’s house for ever and ever. The second reading, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, repeats the point: God will fulfil all your needs as lavishly as only God can.

Generous, extravagant, fulfilling all needs, unexpected and unsolicited gifts: so is the grace of God in his love for humanity.

But then an off note begins to sound, a fly in the ointment, a bitter drop to distract us from the sweet things we have been hearing up to now. Paul says that such confidence in God’s goodness enable him to cope with whatever circumstances life sends his way: poor or rich, poverty or plenty, he can do all things with the help of the One who strengthens him. It was good, he concludes, that you shared in my hardships. Why good? So as to appreciate the gift, it seems, to realise that even in the dark valleys the Lord is there, not just present with us but sharing those things with us and strengthening us to live through them.

The gospel parable brings even deeper darkness and bitterness. There are some who will refuse to come to the great feast which has been prepared, now described as the wedding banquet for a king’s son. They turn away, valuing other things ahead of that banquet. It even turns nasty with some of them harassing and killing the servants of the king. His retaliation is swift and brutal. The invitation is thrown open to anybody and everybody, bad and good alike, so that the wedding hall is filled with guests.

We could stop there and some think that the parable ends there. It would be puzzling enough. What has happened to the universal and extravagant love, to the power of God to take away all sadness and mourning, everything that might hinder access to anybody’s joyful participation in the banquet? It seems that people are free to refuse and what a tragedy that would be. Failing to appreciate the gift offered, disdaining the generosity of the one who invites you, even to the point of being violent towards those who renew the invitation – it seems as if the refusal must be conscious, deliberate, considered, free.

But we could also read on, listening to what is either the second part of the parable, or a second parable latched on to the first one. This is about a person invited to the wedding feast who is not wearing the appropriate dress and this is the strangest note of all in this passage. Are we all supposed to go around all the time dressed in our best clobber just in case somebody, out of the blue, invites us to a wedding? Imagine the cities and countryside of the world with everybody dressed every day for a wedding! It would be a wonderful sight, a kind of sartorial paradise, and would keep the fashion designers of Milan and Paris in business like never before.

So what is it about? It can seem as if what was unconditional up to then – the universal and extravagant love of God offered to all people – has suddenly become conditional. There is something we must be or do in order to maintain our place at the banquet. Rich and poor are invited, good and bad are invited, anybody and everybody is invited – so what is it they must become or must do in order to secure their place?

Perhaps it is simply a parable of readiness like others in the gospel. Be prepared. Be alert. Be watchful. You know not the day nor the hour. Don’t forget to have oil in your lamp, because the bridegroom is coming at an hour you do not expect.

And what does it mean to ‘have oil in your lamp’, to have on a ‘wedding garment’? Isaiah talks about the Lord removing garments from us – the veil of mourning, the shroud enwrapping all nations. The gospel now speaks of a garment we need to put on which must refer to what Saint Paul talks about when he tells us to ‘put on Christ’ (Romans 13:14; Galatians 3:27). To wear the right garment means to follow Christ – especially on the way of the cross, as Paul says elsewhere in Philippians – and so to recognize and appreciate the gift held out to us in the invitation we have received.

The man being cast out is not then an arbitrary punishment by a god once again become irascible. It is rather the truth of the man’s situation, that he has not disposed himself to appreciate the gift for what it is: a gift, freely, generously and extravagantly offered. So not to be presumed upon and not to be taken without gratitude to the giver.

That seems to be it. We are all invited to the banquet. We anticipate it in our celebration of the Eucharist. But we must make every effort to dispose ourselves correctly. It is only the courteous thing to do. But it also means learning how to appreciate love received so that we might become capable in our turn of loving in the same way: freely, generously, extravagantly. Loving one another as Jesus loved his disciples, and loving him, the Father’s invitation to us, so that we will be ready to be with him when the time comes, our hearts filled with gratitude and wonder.

We pray that the Lord will help us to dress ourselves in that way and so be ready. The invitation has already been sent and we have received it. In the Lord’s own house shall we dwell, when God has removed the garments that hinder our joy and enables us to put on the one garment that guarantees our eternal happiness, God’s only Son, Jesus Christ.

Week 27 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 3:22-29; Psalm 105; Luke 11:27-28

This is probably the shortest gospel reading in the Church's liturgical year. But it packs a punch. Like Elisabeth earlier in Luke's gospel this woman 'raises her voice'. She is a preacher but unlike Elizabeth her message misses the mark. Jesus corrects her: my mother is to be praised in the first place for her faith, for hearing the Word of God and for keeping it.

It is as if the woman is still caught on the level of the first creation. The fruitfulness of the womb and the nourishment of the breast, these are blessings of that first creation. Hearing the Word of God and keeping it, these are blessings of the new creation. The first creation blesses but confines us. (Paul says in the first reading for this day in year 2). It is the new creation that sets us free, the kingdom of faith and of the Spirit. New relationships are established in this kingdom and on a new basis: 'my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it', Jesus had explained earlier (Luke 8:21). It is not just about hearing the Word, and being able to parrot it back perhaps, it is about 'keeping' and 'doing' the Word (cf Luke 6:46-49).

Mary herself wondered about this transition from the first to the new creation. 'How can it be', she asks the angel of the annunciation. The first creation required only God's Word: 'let it be', and so it was. But the new, second, creation requires the words and believing hearts of human beings - Mary who says 'let it be done to me according to your word', Jesus who says 'my food is to do the will of my Father who sent me'. Such is the dignity bestowed on the creature by God, that we are made participants in the construction of the new creation, builders with Him of the kingdom that is coming.

Life remains difficult for us even when we believe and seek to do what the Word asks of us. This is because we belong to both creations. We belong to the Second, the Last, Adam who for freedom has set us free, but we still belong also to the First Adam. The 'old man' remains alive in us as long as we are pilgrims in this world and our work of being transformed is still underway. The 'new man' is already created and has come to birth in us. But we continue to struggle to convert our minds fully to what Christ has done for us, and to walk purely and simply in the way he has mapped out for us.

Week 27 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 3:7-14; Ps 111; Luke 11:15-26

His letter to the Galatians is one of the most personal of Paul's letters. In it he tells us about his own spiritual journey and about his argument with Peter at Antioch. The passage we read today can seem like a simple piece of rabbinic argument about the interpretation of the law but in it we get another glimpse of Paul's most personal struggle.

He quotes Deuteronomy 21:23, 'cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree'. This text helps to explain Saul's fury, and his conviction of righteousness, in persecuting and even killing Christians. In terms of what the Scriptures taught, what the Christians were proposing was blasphemous and obscene. They were claiming that the Lord, the God of Israel, had shown his power, and revealed his holiness, in an accursed thing, a hanged man.

Saul was moved to imitate Phinehas, praised in the psalms for his defence of God's righteousness (Psalm 106:28-31). A plague afflicted the people as a result of their worship of the Baal of Peor, into which they had been seduced by intermarrying with the Midianites. Phinehas killed a Hebrew man married to a Midianite woman (Numbers 25:1-9): this is the event hidden under the psalmist's innocuous 'Phinehas stood up and intervened'. Phinehas was celebrated as a defender of the holiness of the God of Israel and Saul's zeal was of the same quality: uncompromising, passionate, violent.

The cross of Christ, Paul tells us later, is folly for Gentiles and a stumbling block for Jews: this was Paul's personal difficulty also, an apparently insoluble one, an obstacle that he could not get over. He could not square this circle, that the Lord would reveal his power and holiness in a way that he had earlier declared to be accursed. It was only his encounter with the Risen Lord on the road to Damascus that convinced him of the truth of what the Christians were teaching: Christ has ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So the possibility of faith by which human beings share in the righteousness of God, the blessing of Abraham, is extended to the Gentiles through Jesus the Christ.

It was indeed true that God had shown his power and revealed his holiness not in the violence of his would-be defenders but in the death of His Son on the Cross. The obstacle that Paul could not get over then became the key to his whole understanding of God and of God's grace. Towards the end of Galatians he writes 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ' (6:14). And in writing to the Corinthians he returns to the obstacle that becomes the key, 'I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified' (1 Cor 2:2).

Our Lady of the Rosary - 7 October

Reading: Acts of the Apostles 1.12-14; Luke 1.46-55; Luke 1:26.38

A story goes around among us that one of our younger and more traditional brothers, in response to John Paul II’s decision to introduce five luminous mysteries of the Rosary, placed a notice in the church where he was assigned. In one column he listed the twenty mysteries of the Rosary ‘as recommended by John Paul II’, the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. In another column he listed the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary ‘as recommended by the Blessed Virgin Mary’, the traditional joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries without the modern addition of luminous mysteries.

Many preachers and teachers had probably worked out a rationale for the three sets of joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. From the joy of Galilee and the romantic preaching and healing ministry of Jesus, through the darkness of his passion and death in Jerusalem, to the glory of the resurrection and his return to Galilee, his return then to the Father from where he sends the Spirit to establish the Church and disseminate in the world the new and risen life of the Kingdom. It was a pleasing pattern, from joy to sorrow to glory.

Back to the drawing board then, to break open this pattern and include also five luminous mysteries. I suppose some people had already thought it strange that the traditional mysteries took us straight from the finding in the Temple, when Jesus was twelve years old, to the agony in the garden, on the eve of his death. Surely there were mysteries to be contemplated in the time between, in the public ministry of teaching and healing, of miracles and exorcisms.

Dominicans particularly, for whom today’s celebration of Our Lady of the Rosary is a major feast, should have been aware that Thomas Aquinas divided the mysteries of the life of Christ into four sets, the mysteries of his coming into the world, those of the progress of his life in this world, those of his departure from the world, and those of his exaltation after this life. Although not exact in every detail this general division corresponds with what we now know as the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the Rosary.

But ‘every action of Christ is for our instruction’ is a saying handed on in the tradition so that we could conceivably continue to gather sets of five mysteries. We could, for example, meditate on five great parables. Or on five remarkable healings. Or on five ways in which God is present to his people. Or on the actions of five characters in the passion of Christ. And so on.

The use of beads and repeated short prayers is found in most of the world’s religions and we could meditate on other sets of mysteries as we seek to enter more fully into the richness of Christ. What is absolutely sacred is the Lord whose life and light we receive through praying the Rosary.  It is a way of contemplating and it is a way of preaching. It is a way of contemplation and a compendium of Christian doctrine for everyone. We might be tempted to consider ourselves too sophisticated for something that is more at home in popular religious devotion. But it has made great contemplatives over the centuries, and it has made great saints.

We are in the company of Mary as we pray the Rosary, just as the apostles and disciples were in her company as the Church waited for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Mary participates in a unique way in the mysteries of her Son’s life, keeping all these things constantly in her heart as she shared personally in so many of them. She becomes a teacher of prayer for us, leading us into the mysteries of Christ, mysteries that are inexhaustible sources of life and light. She becomes a preacher of the Word for us, the one who first brought the good news of the gospel to another person when she visited her cousin Elisabeth. 

The Rosary is very near to us, as close as the fingers on our hands. It is a prayer that can be said anywhere. We can bring to it our own experiences of joy and learning, of sorrow and exaltation. And as we contemplate those mysteries of light in which we meditate on Jesus the teacher we place ourselves in the position of students and disciples, keen to learn what all these mysteries mean, keen to imitate what they contain and keen finally to obtain what they promise.