Easter Week 5 Tuesday

Readings: Acts 14:19-28; Psalm 145; John 14:27-31a

Today's first reading contains the phrase 'door of faith' which gives its name to the apostolic letter of Benedict XVI that opened the Year of Faith which the Church celebrated in 2012-2013. With these words Acts summarises what God did with Paul and Barnabas in their first missionary journey: he opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. Itinerant, charismatic, preachers, they brought the Gospel firstly to the Jewish communities of Asia Minor, and then to any Gentiles who were prepared to listen. Their message was that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, that he is in fact the Son of God, that salvation is in his name alone, and that his death and resurrection have transformed the relationship between human beings and God. Those who, through the preaching of the apostles, became convinced of its truth were baptised for the forgiveness of their sins. They were then to live according to this new Way, by prayer, mutual love, sharing goods, celebrating the Eucharist, and bearing witness to their Lord.

Not all of them were called to follow Paul, Barnabas, and the other apostles, as itinerant preachers and founders of churches. Some of them were called to that - Timothy, Titus, Silas, and others, whose work is recorded in the Acts and in the Epistles of Paul. But most of them remained where they were, living in their families and carrying on their work, 'ordinary' Christians who believed in Christ and sought to live their faith and its demands in the course of their 'ordinary' lives.

In fact this passage from Acts is one of the first in which we hear of the Church getting itself organised. Paul appointed presbyters in each Church, we are told. To use a later language, he ordained priests. These stayed behind as the leaders of the community, adapting a form of government borrowed from Judaism. The solemnity of this moment of ordination or appointment is shown by the fact that Paul and Barnabas prayed and fasted before making their decisions. Likewise, the church at Antioch had prayed and fasted before laying hands on Paul and Barnabas, deputing them for the missionary journey. We see how it is the Church that appoints its leaders, praying for the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit when it makes its choices, praying (and fasting!) in preparation for this task.

The churches begin to know peace: we are told this from time to time in the Acts of the Apostles. But the peace that came to them through this new faith was of the kind described by Jesus in today's gospel reading. It is peace not as the world gives but as the Risen Lord gives, something deeper, more enduring, more mysterious, often paradoxical. It can exist along with rejection and persecution, as Paul and Barnabas discovered: as they shake the dust off their feet on leaving Antioch in Pisidia they are filled with joy and the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:51-52). Their faith gave them patience and perseverance to continue in their mission of encouraging and strengthening the believers, exhorting them all to persevere in the faith. Just as it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and so enter into his glory, so 'it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God' (Acts 14:22).

The readings today sketch for us a picture of the developing Church. The community of believers is missionary and domestic, itinerant and structured, local and universal, in the world, clearly, but always somehow not of the world, a Church welcomed by some and rejected by others, bearing a wonderful promise of grace and peace, but, for whatever reasons, provoking rejection and anger. Do not be troubled or afraid, Jesus tells the disciples, my going to the Father is a reason for joy because I will be with the Father, and 'the Father is greater than I'.

Easter Week 5 Monday

Readings: Acts 14:5-18; Psalm 115; John 14:21-26

Paul and Barnabas are on a roller coaster as they travel around Asia Minor preaching the gospel. In one moment they are in danger of being stoned and they make themselves scarce. In the next moment they are in danger of being deified as people prepare to sacrifice animals to them. The interruption of the holy generates fear and awe, leading human beings to seek either to expel the cause of such feelings or to include it somehow within their established way of thinking and living.

Faith (which Paul sees in the crippled man) is a door, an opening, a vision on to another landscape, but one which remains largely unclear and mysterious. ('Now I see in a glass, darkly.') Some of faith's manifestations encourage us to include it, to welcome and embrace it: the healing of a crippled man, for example. In other moments we will want to turn from this call to believe and drive it away: when it shows us up as crippled men and women, for example, and directs us to restructure our world and to revise radically our ways of thinking and living.

All of this happens with the preaching of the gospel: the crippled jump up and walk while the settled moral and doctrinal convictions of Jews and Gentiles are relativised and they are asked to open up to a new reality. They are instructed to get up, shake off a paralysis they may or may not have been aware of, and walk in a new way.

Jesus speaks of this new reality, this new way of walking, in today's gospel reading. First and last it is love, a love of his word, a love reciprocated because it originates not in the believer but in the one who speaks that word ('this is the love I mean, not our love for God but God's love for us'). The one who speaks that word to us is Jesus who teaches us, however, that the word he speaks originates not in himself but in the Father who sent him. Together they will love the ones who keep their word, they will come and make their home with them.

Now Jesus reveals more, teaching us that this word will be carried forward by another advocate, another who is to be sent by the Father, and by Jesus returned to the Father. This is the Holy Spirit, the power of love abiding in those who believe to ensure that they are fully taught, that they remember the fulness of the Lord's word.

This is the irruption of the holy promised by the preaching of the gospel. 'Irruption' seems too violent a word for it, this coming of Father, Word and Spirit to dwell in us, to make their home in us, to abide (what a beautiful word that is!), to consolidate in us the word breathing love which God is. The Christian tradition will speak of it as the indwelling of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity or even as the human being's participation in the divine nature. (So the Lycaonians who wanted to worship Paul and Barnabas were not entirely mistaken even if their understanding was still quite seriously distorted!)

Will we stone those who bring this message of the indwelling of God in human hearts? Will we be so taken by it that we will treat its bearers as gurus, perhaps even as themselves gods? We might think ourselves beyond both of these primitive reactions. More likely then, in us, would be to regard it as no big deal, as already within our comprehension, to treat it with an indifference born of familiarity.

We must trust that the word of the Father, spoken by Jesus, and echoed across the centuries by the Holy Spirit in the Church, will find ways to remind us of its presence, of its promise, of its call. It is a delicate process for it is a prompting of us and in us by God who is infinitely holy. How will we receive such an intimate and profound approach? At times we may want to spit it out and turn our backs. At times we may want to use it for any number of purposes of our own.

As we move towards Pentecost let us pray that we can remain open to the coming of the Spirit, keen to hear the word in its fulness, ready to enter more deeply into its depth of meaning, disposed to the radical changes the word promises. Be not afraid, says the Lord, knocking on our door, come with honourable intentions, that keeping his word we might remain in his love, that he with his Father and the Holy Spirit might dwell with us, and that we might have life, a fulness of life as yet unimagined.

Fear alerts us to what might be lost. Love teaches us that what might be lost is nothing compared with the gifts in store for us.

Easter Week 5 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Acts 6:1-7; Psalm 32 (33); 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

The image of many mansions (John 14:2) leads us into thinking of heaven as a physical place (which of course it must be in some sense if it is to accommodate our resurrected bodies). But Jesus is speaking in the first place about the dimensions of God’s love, which is not measured by any of our standards whether temporal or spatial, imaginative or conceptual. The love of the Father is extravagant and generous, a love that comes to find us and in which there is room for everyone. The only measure of it we are given is Jesus himself who is the way to it, the truth of it, and the life it brings.

This solemn ‘I AM the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6) is just the latest in a series of such statements that punctuate John’s gospel – I am the bread of life, the living bread, the light of the world, the resurrection and the life, the door, the good shepherd, the vine. We find examples in the other gospels too: ‘do not be afraid: it is I (literally, I am)’ (Mark 6:50). When Moses asked God his name God replied ‘I am who I am’ (Exodus 3:14). The ‘I am’ statements in the gospels have to do with this: clearly we are being taught that Jesus is entitled to the divine name, he is God present among us.

The same Moses who asked God’s name later asked to see God. In response he was told that he could not see God’s face and live, but that he would be allowed to see God’s back (Exodus 33:18, 21-23). ‘No one has ever seen God’, we are told in the prologue to John’s gospel, but ‘the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father has made him known’. In today’s gospel reading the apostle Philip asks to see the Father: Jesus tells him that to have seen him is to have seen the Father, for Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in Jesus (John 14:8-10).

So, in giving us a name for God and in showing us the face of God, Jesus is not only a greater one than Moses but is also God’s fullest response to the requests made by Moses. We are given a name where Moses was not: it is the name of Jesus. We are allowed to see God’s face where Moses was not: it is the face of Jesus, the only Son who reveals the glory of the Father. The law was given through Moses – that first instalment of truth, God’s word dwelling among his people as the standard by which they should live. Grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ – that final instalment of truth, God’s word pitching his tent among us. He is not only now the concrete standard or norm for all our living. He is also the love that makes it possible for us to live, as we ought and as we desire, in freedom and truth and love.

For God’s people escaping Egypt, Moses is the one to whom God reveals the way they should take. From the mountain of his encounter with God he brings the tablets of the truth by which they should live. He leads them to the threshold of the Promised Land and so to the life God had prepared for them. Now it is Jesus who is not only a messenger of these things but who is in his own Person the way, the truth and the life.

As God’s people were called from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, so those who have come to believe have been called out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Peter 2:4-9). The destination now is not a geographical one, not the earthly paradise of Galilee and the Jordan valley. The destination is simply the Father who is love and who has first loved us. It is strange to be told that believers will do even greater things than the Son because he has returned to the Father. Here is another reason why we need the Spirit, as Paul will explain (1 Corinthians 2:12), to help us understand the gift we have received, what it means to be living stones in that spiritual house, living mansions in the city of God.

Easter Week 4 Saturday

Readings: Acts 13:44-.52; Psalm 98; John 14:7-14

You can listen here to a homily for today

Easter Week 4 Friday

Readings: Acts 13:26-33; Psalm 2; John 14:1-6

When Benedict XVI took that name as Pope it drew attention to one of the forgotten popes of the 20th century, Giacomo Della Chiesa, who reigned as Benedict XV from September 1914 to January 1922. His reign was dominated by the First World War and its aftermath. He is remembered as a pope who gave his energy, along with his extensive diplomatic experience and skills, to encouraging reconciliation and rebuilding peace, across Europe especially, and between the Church and the state in many nations, not least in Italy itself.

Benedict XV's motto was the opening verse of Psalm 70 (71), In you, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. It is also the final verse of the Te Deum, the Church's great hymn of praise and thanksgiving, sung when wars and plagues end, sung at the turning of each year and to mark moments of special gratitude. That final verse reads In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in aeternum' 'in you, O Lord, I hoped: let me not be forever lost'. It is a solemn prayer at the end of a great hymn, given greater solemnity and seriousness by the musical setting to which it is often sung. To be lost is bad enough. To be lost forever would be dreadful, dreadful beyond words.

Place alongside this prayer the famous declaration of Jesus in today's gospel reading: 'I am the way, the truth, and the life'. It addresses three ways in which people can be lost and reminds us that the Lord in whom we trust rescues us from each of them.

If I do not know where I am, or I do not know where I am going, then I am lost. As Thomas - yes, the doubter! - says in the reasonable question that elicited Jesus's declaration, 'we do not know where you are going - how can we know the way?' 'I am the way ...' Jesus is our present companion, our future destiny and our guide if we are to get from here to there. Because he is the way, staying with him means we cannot get lost on our journey.

If I am ignorant or in error about things that I ought to know and know correctly, or about things I ought to understand and accept, then I am, once again, lost. We often say it when we are trying to understand something difficult: 'I'm lost'. 'What is truth?' is a question on the lips of another doubter, Pontius Pilate, a question to which Jesus does not reply. Is it that he has already answered it in today's gospel passage, 'I am the truth'? Was Pilate supposed to know this? Jesus had just told him that his mission was to bear witness to the truth and Pilate, unwittingly, helps him to fulfil that mission. Because Jesus is the truth, staying with him means we cannot get lost in ignorance or error.

Our animal nature reacts most strongly to anything that would threaten its life. To lose its life is, for any living being, the ultimate way of being lost. To be lost here is to be dead, to cease to exist, to be forever lost since once an animal nature loses its life what can restore it? There are many levels on which we are alive - biological life, intellectual life, social life, spiritual life. Just as we live on all these levels we can also die on all these levels. Jesus has already taught the disciples that he has come that they would have life in all its fulness. All of these plus a level of life beyond anything we can imagine are held out to us by Jesus, who is the Author of Life, the firstborn of all creation, and the firstborn from the dead. Because Jesus is the life, staying with him means we cannot get lost in death, we cannot be lost forever.

'All the promises of God are fulfilled in the raising of Jesus from the dead': Paul preaches this in today's first reading. The prayer of Psalm 70 (71) is therefore answered. You will not be lost forever because the One who is risen from the dead is your way, your truth, and your life. 'My sheep listen to my voice', Jesus told us earlier this week, 'I know them and they follow me, I give them eternal life, they will never be lost'.

We will sometimes feel lost in the course of our life - about where we are, about what is true, about living life in its fulness - but to place our hope in Jesus Christ means we cannot be lost forever. We will travel safely on the way. We will live in the light of truth. We will enjoy the fulness of life.

Easter Week 4 Thursday

Readings: Acts 13:13-25; Psalm 89; John 13:16-20

There was a practice in medieval times of dividing a sermon in two. A first part was delivered in the morning, a second part, called the collation, in the afternoon or evening. The lectionary does something like this with Paul's sermon in the synagogue of Antioch, the other city with that name, in Pisidia (Acts 13:13-41). We get the first part of his sermon today and a second part tomorrow. Unfortunately, the final part, verses 34-43, is not to be found anywhere in the Catholic lectionary.

This sermon shows us how Paul set about preaching the gospel message to a Jewish audience. When he gets to Athens we will see him preaching to non-Jews. That will be in Acts 17 and it is instructive to compare his different approaches to the same conclusion as he adapts his preaching to his different audiences.

It was Jesus himself who taught the apostles to interpret everything in the scriptures as being about himself. We see it in Luke 24 as well as in the speeches of Peter in the earlier chapters of Acts. Obviously the scriptures, the record of the promise of God to Israel, is the place to begin when speaking to a Jewish audience. Paul shows that he also knows how to do this. In fact Paul's 'conversion' is not so much a change of religion or faith as it is him simply - but how radical this is! - coming to see that the whole trajectory of the scriptures, and the whole of Israel's history, is towards Jesus. 

That history begins in Egypt, or even earlier, with Abraham, and the theme all through is the promise made to Israel's ancestors. That promise, sealed with a covenant that was renewed across the generations, guided the people and their leaders through the exodus and the conquest. It sustained them through the time of the judges and the kings. It informed the preaching of the prophets and the meditations of the wise. It encourages them to hope during the exile and to look forward to some kind of definitive fulfilment in a coming kingdom.

The apostles preach that this promise is not only still valid but that it has now been definitively fulfilled, a fulfilment sealed with a new covenant in the blood of Jesus. This was the scandal that blocked Saul before he became Paul: 'cursed be anyone who hangs on a tree'. But now he preaches boldly that God has brought a saviour to Israel, a descendant of David in accordance with God's promise, Jesus of Nazareth.

It is an amazing claim and many of his Jewish listeners will find it impossible to accept. The claim is that Jesus not only takes his place alongside David, Samuel, Moses and Abraham, but that he is somehow superior to all of them. It is not that Jesus is to be understood in relation to them, it is that they are now to be understood in relation to him. Just as the disciples too are to be understood in relation to him: 'whoever receives the one I send, receives me', as he says in today's gospel reading. It applies to Peter and John and Paul, but also to Abraham and Moses and David.

Jesus pushes the story even further back, or higher up, to the eternal and heavenly source of the promise and of its history. It is the Father who has sent Jesus, and so anyone who welcomes him is welcoming the Father, the Creator of all things and the Lord of all history. Jesus is inserted in Israel's history as its end point but also as its origin and as its centre. In fact it is more true to say that that history has always been inserted within the career of the Word of God, that it finds its place within the Word's presence in creation and his work in history. The prophets and kings belong there too, in this history of Jesus the Saviour. Moses and Elijah have roles in it and so do Peter and Stephen, Paul and Barnabas, Augustine and Aquinas, Catherine and Teresa - down to our day and to our 'being sent'.

It may still seem incredible. The promise is for us and for our children. The salvation offered is for us and for those who come after us. Washed in the blood of the saviour we are sent to speak to others about him and about what he has come to mean to us. 'If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them', Jesus says to the apostles after he has washed their feet.

Let us seek to find our place, our role, in this history of salvation. For there is a place for each one, there is a role for each person. It is what we name our 'vocation', the way in which each of us is called to give testimony to the truth we have come to realise.

Saint Catherine of Siena - 29 April

THE SCHOOL OF LOVE

The most startling moment in Mel Gibson’s film about the Passion of Jesus was when the soldier pierced the side of Christ and, as we are told in St John’s gospel, ‘immediately there came out blood and water’ (19.34). I had always imagined it as a trickle and many artists represent it in that way, but in the film it was a shower, bursting out to wash the faces of those standing at the foot of the cross. It is the saving fountain spoken of in the prophecy of Zechariah (13.1), what the liturgy refers to as ‘the fountain of sacramental life in the Church’ (Preface of the Sacred Heart).

                                                                                                        

The early Dominicans were not afraid of the physical aspects of the passion of Christ. The Order was founded at a time when devotion to the passion was growing strongly. When they prayed their preferred icon or focus was the crucifix. We see this, for example, in a set of illustrations from the 14^th century that show St Dominic at prayer before the crucifix. Many of the frescoes of Fra Angelico at Florence show the blood of Christ flowing from his side in great abundance and pouring down the trunk of the cross to wash and water the earth.

St Catherine of Siena, whose feast we celebrate today, also directed her prayer to Christ crucified and had much to say about the power of his blood. In fact, she says, the ways in which we dispose ourselves physically in relation to the crucifix express different moments or aspects in our relationship with Christ.

We may kneel to kiss his feet, for example. This is the attitude of the creature and sinner, bowing before her Creator and Lord, still living somewhat in fear, anxious about punishment and loss.

Or we may stand to kiss his side, Catherine says. This is the position of one who is growing in love for her Lord, standing now instead of kneeling, kissing his breast rather than his feet, and therefore beginning to enter into the ‘perfect love which casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18). But at this point our love is still ‘interested’, she says, we tend to look to the gifts Christ can give us and not yet simply at the giver of those gifts, Christ himself.

The third stage or aspect is when we reach up to kiss the lips of Christ. Now we can speak about the love of friendship, Catherine says. She even speaks of a union with Christ and with all creation (what the Christian tradition refers to as ‘mystical’ experience). We are no longer servants but friends (John 15.15). We have grown to maturity in the Christian life. No longer do we love God out of a kind of fear. No longer do we love God for what he can do for us or for what he can give us. But we are brought to love God for himself and this is what holiness means.

Catherine teaches us that the school in which we learn these things is prayer, a prayer focused on the cross of Jesus and on the blood flowing from his side. She writes that ‘we learn every virtue in constant and faithful humble prayer’. We learn about ourselves when we pray. This is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to persevere in prayer. It takes us into what Catherine calls ‘the cell of self-knowledge’ and often we do not like what we see there. But prayer is also the place where we meet God and learn how to relate to God and become like God, loving as God has loved us.

St Thomas Aquinas, a century before Catherine, says similar things. In a conference on the Creed he writes that ‘the passion of Christ is sufficient in itself to instruct us completely in our whole life’.

These saints were not suggesting that the purpose of Christian life was to find our way to some personal ‘peak experience’ which would take us inside ourselves and away from others. The Dominicans soon took as one of their mottos ‘to contemplate and to pass on to others the fruits of contemplation’. Maturity in the Christian life brings with it a new sense of responsibility for people and a new sensitivity to the sufferings and needs of the world. Maturity in the Christian life – what St Paul calls ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (Ephesians 4.13) – means being compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate (Luke 6.36).

Catherine of Siena is one of the greatest teachers of this wisdom in the history of Christianity. This is why we honour her as a Doctor of the Church.