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.

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

Readings: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 42; John 10:11-18

A religion of sheep led by a lamb - it doesn't sound like a promising project in a macho world that is more often than not cruel, cynical and violent. And so it proved as we read about the difficulties faced by the first Christian believers, their rejection and expulsion from the synagogues, the sporadic violence against them and then their outright persecution.

In spite of all that the Christian faith took root and flourished. It flourished geographically: we have been reading the Acts of the Apostles which traces this geographical spread of the faith from Jerusalem, through Samaria, on through Asia Minor, into Europe, and eventually to Rome, centre of the world at the time. It seems that the first Christian communities would have been quite small but still it is impressive that so many of them were founded in the first decades after the Resurrection of the Lord.

So it was not through conquest or imposition by civil authorities that the faith spread. It was not any secular, still less military, arm supporting the preaching. (We might think of the conquest of the Americas as an example of the latter.) Au contraire, we might say, for this religion of sheep led by a lamb.

So what was its power? Can it be explained only by the fact that this project was God's project and that God's purpose is not to be frustrated? It might also - on a human level - be explained by what this new religion offered: salvation from sin, freedom from oppression, victory over death. It is about life, a fulness of life, and that fulness of life in eternity: eternal life.

The shepherd of Israel who calls his own sheep by name and leads them out has been revealed as the shepherd of all humanity. The springs of living water opened up in the heart of the world are flowing for all people. The happiness and fulfillment and flourishing that they promised is offered freely to everybody. The election or preference of the Hebrews is extended to the Gentiles. The proferred gift of eternal life is for all.

This is what attracted people to the new faith. It is what explains how in spite of everything they were enduring the apostles were always filled with joy.

Easter Week 4 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 22(23); 1 Peter 2:20b-25; John 10:1-10

In the summer holidays of 1270, Thomas Aquinas finally got round to answering a query he had received a few months earlier from James of Tonengo. The two had become friends at Orvieto some years earlier when James was a chaplain at the papal court there and Thomas was the lector or teacher at the Dominican priory. Thomas had since returned to Paris and James had left the papal service and was now a canon of the diocese of Vercelli.

James’s question to Thomas was about the morality of casting lots as a way of making decisions about important matters, specifically about appointments to high office in the Church. The summer of 1270 marked the midpoint of the longest interregnum in the history of the papacy. Pope Clement IV had died in November 1268 but his successor, Gregory X, was not elected until almost three years later, his pontificate beginning in September 1271. In fact it was this three-year vacancy that led Gregory X, when he was elected, to institute the conclave as we now know it. The three-year delay had disturbed and unsettled everybody, leading the civil authorities at Viterbo firstly to lock the cardinals in, then to take the roof off the church where they were meeting, and finally to starve them slowly until they reached a decision.

James’s question to Thomas about casting lots as a way of making decisions was related to this interregnum. It was not a question about a breakthrough in the conclave itself, however, but about the appointment of a bishop in Vercelli. The canons were unable to agree who it should be, there was no Pope and would not be a Pope for a further 15 months, and so James is wondering about the option of casting lots as a way of coming to a decision. It might even have been thought that this would be a way of leaving more space for the Holy Spirit to make his mind known about the matter. We might be tempted to think that there is something in this: if human thoughts and desires and fears and preferences, all that goes under the name ‘politics’, were to be removed from the situation and the decision left entirely to God, would it not be better for everybody?

Even with 115 or 120 men voting nowadays to choose a new Pope we believe, of course, that it is God who is choosing the Pope. This may sound a bit startling, particularly in the days running up to a papal election, but on Good Friday each year, when we gather for the liturgy, we pray to God asking him to ‘protect the Pope you have chosen for us’. We know that Matthias was chosen to take the place of Judas and that it was by the casting of lots that he was elected. Would this not be a safer way of doing it still rather than leaving it to the uncertain politics of a group of interested human beings?

Thomas Aquinas, in his response to James of Tonengo, composed a short but very dense and nuanced treatise on the morality of casting lots, on what we might call alternative ways of finding out things that are hidden and of making decisions about the future. Casting lots as an alternative to making decisions may be acceptable in some circumstances, Thomas says, most of them minor, although he allows that the choosing of civil leaders could on occasion be done in this way. What he will not allow in any circumstances is the choosing of Church leaders by the casting of lots.

Far from believing that this would leave more room for the Holy Spirit to work, Thomas believes precisely the opposite. Where a decision is to be made by divine inspiration, he says, it is an insult to the Holy Spirit to withdraw that decision from human thinking and choosing. We believe that the Holy Spirit has come on the Church, Thomas says, something that had not yet happened when the Apostles cast lots to choose Matthias. The Holy Spirit instructs human sense to judge rightly, according to Saint Paul, so that the working of the Spirit in the Church is not apart from human beings but is within them, through their intelligence and their free judgements.

He quotes St Ambrose of Milan who says that one elected by lot is not contained within the responsibility of human judgement. So it is important that human beings accept responsibility for these key decisions and that the one who is elected knows that his election is within such responsibility. It is the concordia, the consensus we might say, of colleges of human beings that ought to produce Church leaders. (One might wonder in passing if this means that not only bishops of Rome but bishops elsewhere ought not to be chosen in some comparable forum as the conclave.)

I realise that I have not said anything about today’s readings on the Good Shepherd or about the fact that today is Vocations Sunday. On the other hand I believe that these comments of Aquinas about the casting of lots are directly relevant to both themes. What he says about the marriage of human spirits and the Holy Spirit in the making of key decisions, is exactly what he will say about the marriage of human spirits and the Holy Spirit in the following of Christ. The Holy Spirit makes us act freely he says in a paradoxical phrase, whenever we are seeking truth, practising good, discerning a vocation.

It is tempting to think that life would be easier if we could find magical ways of manipulating God, ways of seducing him into revealing his will and even making our decisions for us. Perhaps we could decide on a language, or a ritual, or a set of signs in which we could then invite God to make his will known. But God wants us to grow up and to become his adult children in Christ. As the adopted children of God, the sheep he calls by name, one by one, we live by the Holy Spirit of God. That is the deepest reality in us. Paul says that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God so that in our thinking, desiring, fearing and preferring the Holy Spirit too is at work.

The key difference between a secular consensus about something and a spiritual one is that the human beings involved in seeking the spiritual one pray. The deacons in Acts 6 are chosen, not by lot but after prayer. The decisions of the so-called council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 are made after prayer so the apostles can make the (apparently) outrageous claim that ‘it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to ourselves’.

How do we hear the call of Christ? We hear it through our human experience. How do we recognise that what we are hearing is the call of Christ? We recognise it if we have become attuned to the voice of Christ in prayer. How do we know that what is happening is not just the outcome of human thinking and deciding? Well it has to be the outcome of human thinking and deciding. What makes it spiritual, we believe, is the prayer which surrounds it and sustains it and which, allowing also for sin of course, ensures that the human beings who are thinking and choosing are open to outcomes that might surprise even themselves.

The first reading teaches us that the listeners to the Spirit-filled Peter are suddenly cut to the quick but that he takes a long time and many arguments to convince them. Both are true in the world of the Spirit where human effort is long and can seem unfulfilling but, to the eyes of faith, all is happening speedily, by the gift of the Spirit, and according to God’s wise government of the Church.

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.