Week 14 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 14:2-10; Ps 50/51; Matthew 10:16-23

There is a puzzle set up by the fact that we hear these two readings together. Hosea tells us to prepare words to say and return to the Lord. In the gospel reading Jesus tells us not to worry about how or what we should say. Obviously the contexts are different. We can fruitfully reflect on this puzzle, I think, taking that well known saying about Saint Dominic, that he spent his time speaking either to God or of God.

These are two ways of serving the Word of God, in prayer and in preaching. The fundamental one is prayer and the other comes after. Often we are tempted to do the opposite. Even this morning, I gave more energy to worrying about what I was to say in this homily than I did to trying to find words with which to pray to God. Presumably if I had spent more time in prayer the homily would have a different character, a depth or flavour that comes from something informed by prayer. We know it when we taste it. We know that our preaching becomes superficial, a bit ritualistic, where it is not originating in the freshness of prayer. And prayer is then instrumentalised: I do it when I am stuck, when I am at a loss for words, rather than for its own sake.

So we must give time and energy in the first place to trying to find words with which to pray. And in the second place, and on the basis of our prayer, we need not worry about what we are to say or how we are to say it when it comes to speaking to people. In prayer we are with the Word, reflecting on Him, spending time with Him, meditating on the scriptures, seeking to be in the intimacy of that encounter with the Word of God. Having become familiar with Him we can move more easily in the affairs of the world, taking Him with us in our hearts.

But in prayer we also learn about another puzzle that emerges from today's readings. Why is it that the mission of the apostles that we heard about yesterday, a mission to carry the word of peace and grace, a message of compassion and healing, meets such fierce opposition? Why the hatred, the envy, the persecution provoked by the preaching of this good news which Jesus speaks about in today's gospel?

Spending time with the Word of God in prayer gives us an insight into this too. In prayer we realise, in relation to our own lives first of all, that the Word is indeed like a two edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). One edge is compassion and mercy and tenderness. The other edge is justice and coherence and truth. We cannot swallow one but not the other.

Only when we become familiar with the Word, and with both sides of its blade, will we be serene in the task of bringing the Word to the world, knowing that one side of God's Word will be very welcome and the other will be rejected, sometimes violently. Our task is to work hard to find words for prayer and to trust in God when it comes to witness and preaching. We learn everything in prayer, Saint Catherine of Siena teaches, the comfort of God's love and grace as well as the fierce clarity of God's holiness and truth.

Week 14 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 11:1-4, 8e-9; Psalm 80; Matthew 10:7-15

Is there anything original in the teaching of Jesus? The question arises from today's readings. All this week we have been reading the prophet Hosea, prophet of the divine hesed. At the heart of the prophecy is a celebration of God's grace, mercy, compassion, and tenderness. God loves his people, wants to be loved by them, and wants them to share the same love with each other. Today's reading includes what may be the most tender image of God in the Bible: like a father teaching his infant to walk, God reaches down to support Israel, guiding and protecting her with the reins of love. The picture is of the harness used sometimes to support infants as they learn how to walk: this is how solicitous God is with Israel, how delicate and tender.

The gospel reading includes instructions for what the apostles are to lay aside as they set out on their mission. This list of instructions is found also in the Talmud, a collection of Jewish traditions. On entering the Temple, the Jewish man was to leave aside his belt and shoes, his bag and money. Jesus quotes this list, applying it now not to the Jew entering the Temple but to the apostles setting out on their mission.

So what is new with Jesus? Well we can say firstly that he gives us a name for the tender Father, 'Abba'. And he teaches us a prayer, gives us his own words with which to pray to this Father.

We can say also that Jesus makes incarnate - realises - the pictures and images, the promises and anticipations, that we find in the Old Testament. They could remain simply beautiful images and aspirations, but the incarnation of the Word of God, the coming among us of the only Son from the Father means they are real. In Jesus the divine hesed becomes flesh. He is full of grace and truth, St John tells us, full of hesed and emet, the divine faithfulness. These are not simply nice ideas but flesh and blood reality. In Jesus the Father is present among us, we see the face of the hidden Father.

The instructions Jesus quotes to his disciples are all about grace. The Jew entering the Temple leaves everything to one side to show that the relationship with God is not an ordinary business or commercial one, not a relationship like the others we establish in human affairs. The complete trust expressed, the complete dependence on God's goodness, makes it clear that this is a relationship of grace. Freely you have received, freely give, Jesus says to them. It is all about grace.

What Jesus does with this list of instructions about entering the Temple is worthy of long meditation. He teaches us that the whole world is a holy place. Or at least that wherever there are people needing the Word of compassion and grace, there is the divine presence. Wherever the Word of Grace is needed and preached, there is God. Wherever there are people living in faith, hope and love, once again God is there. It is not just in certain places or in certain buildings that God is to be found but wherever grace is at work. True worshippers worship in spirit and truth, Jesus says to the Samaritan woman.

Finally we can say that Jesus in his turn teaches us how to walk. He teaches us the way along which we are to walk. He shares with his disciples his own teaching and saving work. He clearly wants us to grow up, to be the mature and adult children of God, walking the way with Him and participating in His work. We are called to share responsibility in the family of God to which we belong.

A closing thought, requiring another homily. We know too that the way on which Jesus teaches us to walk leads to the cross. Now there is another biblical image, the final revelation, of the divine hesed. Is it beautiful or is it ugly? What is the mystery that explains this particular realisation of the tender love of God for humanity?

Week 14 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 10:1-3, 7-8, 12; Psalm 105; Matthew 10:1-7

The term humility is connected with humus, meaning the ground or the earth. To be humble could then be taken to mean lowering oneself, perhaps considering oneself as of no particular value, perhaps even allowing oneself to be walked on ... it can get extreme and we move towards the vice of pusillanimity which one colleague described colourfully as 'humility gone mad'.

A better way to take this connection with humus, the ground or earth, is to link it with something like the message of Hosea in the first reading today: 'break up for yourselves a new field'. It means be prepared to start all over again. It means be prepared to allow the Lord to plough up your life, to turn things over, to reach down into the depths of your heart and soul in order to freshen things up.

Pride is solid, isn't it, strong and resistant, whereas humility is soft and docile, it is open to learning new things and to being available in new ways. The new field that is broken up by the plough has the potential to bear much fruit. In a similar way the humble man or woman has the potential to bear much fruit. In fact the beatitude that brings us closest to humility, 'blessed are the meek', is the one that brings the reward of inheriting the earth.

In the gospel reading Jesus sends the apostles back to the beginning, to the heart of Israel. For the moment forget about pagan territory and Samaritan territory, he says. There is a need to go back to that old field, Israel, and to make it new again, to plough it up, freshen it up, and get it ready for a new era of fruitfulness.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand. If we are to enter into that kingdom, to live its life, then we must become like little children. That means being fresh and open, being keen and eager to learn again the lessons of life. To be humble is to be like that, ready and willing that the Lord should once again shake up my life, dig deeply into the soil of it, break the crust of pride that threatens to choke it, and liberate the potential for love and life and joy which lies hidden within it. Unclean spirits will be driven out and every disease and illness of soul will be cured. A new world begins with the turning of the sod, with the sowing of new seed, with allowing the earth to breathe. And the door that opens us to such an experience is called humility.

Week 14 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 8:4-7, 11-13; Matthew 9:32-38

In his commentary on this passage of Matthew's gospel, St Thomas Aquinas says that in how he acts here Jesus 'gives an example for preachers'. It is not the only place where he uses this phrase, understanding the public ministry of Jesus as the apostolic school, the place in which Jesus is teaching the apostles what is expected of them.

Thomas picks out three points in this education of preachers. Jesus goes around the towns and villages. Preachers must be ready to move, Thomas says, not staying always in one place. We can think of place geographically, of course, but in other ways also. The preacher must be willing to work in different situations and contexts, with different kinds of people responding to different needs and challenges. There must be an availability in the preacher, a willingness to move to where needs are greatest.

Secondly, Jesus preaches and teaches and cures as he goes from place to place. The preacher must be ready not just to talk but also to act. Jesus is a healer as well as a teacher. The one who preaches but does not practise will realise (please God) that his words are empty, blowing in the wind. Compassion is the root of preaching as we are also taught in this passage and compassion moves people not just to preach and to teach but also to alleviate suffering in other ways, to correct injustice, to undertake any of the works of mercy.

Thirdly, Thomas makes the point that some preachers have the task of preparing the harvest and others (it seems to be implied by him) the task of reaping it. Perhaps he is influenced by how St Paul was to speak later about Christian preachers, that some sow, some water, and some reap the harvest. How has the harvest become 'full'? Thomas understands it in the sense of mature or ripe and feels that some work of preaching and teaching must already have taken place to bring it to this point.

All of this in the context of the cure of a dumb man. It is a reminder to the preacher that it is God who gives not just words, the capacity for speech, but effective words, words that achieve their purpose. It is God who takes away our dumbness, the limitations of our preaching that come from sinfulness and tiredness and whatever other source. Wherever the words we speak become for another person words that carry the Word, it is the work of the Spirit moving their minds to see what is true and their hearts to embrace what is good. But the preacher has an essential, and privileged, role in assisting this process of encounter with God's compassionate Word.

Pope Francis, in his exhortation on The Joy of the Gospel, reminds us that all baptised Christians are, by virtue of their baptism, missionary disciples.  All must be ready to bear witness to Christ, in ways appropriate to each one's vocation, through availability, through speaking, through action.

Week 14 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Hosea 2:16, 17-18, 21-22; Ps 144/145; Matthew 9:18-26

'Jesus rose and followed him'. We are more used to this phrase being used about people who follow Jesus: they take up their beds and follow him, they leave their nets and follow him, they leave their tax office and follow him. But here we are told that Jesus gets up and follows the man whose daughter has died. Jesus too is obedient, he hears a call and he responds to it.

The first reading, a well known and very beautiful passage from Hosea, teaches us about the kind of relationship God wants to have with His people. It is not to be that of master and slave in which one kind of obedience will be found but that of bridegroom and bride in which another kind of obedience will be found. The obedience in marriage is mutual, between equals, arising from the committed love of bride and groom. Love is the source of this obedience and so it is an obedience that is completely free. This is how God wants His people to be relating to Him. But it also binds God to a comparable obedience for the covenant is always two sided.

The love of Christ compels us, St Paul says in 2 Corinthians. There is a love compelling God also. Or better the love that God is compels Him. We learn from Jesus, God-with-us, that He too is listening out for human need, for the places and people who need compassion and help. His obedience is to turn towards those people and those places, to respond to the call of their poverty and distress, to get up and seek them out.

It is the ideal of obedience for which we strive, an obedience that arises simply and solely from love and that gets all its meaning from the love from which it flows. Of course there are other loves, other desires, jostling together in us but we can pray that this love, for Christ and his way, will become more and more the fundamental and dominant love of our lives, the one that obliges us to the obedience of love, the utterly free obedience which, Jesus shows us, God is.

Saint Thomas the Apostle - 3 July

Readings: Ephesians 2:19-22; Psalm 116; John 20:24-29

The apostle Thomas is to be thanked not so much for asking the reasonable question - 'you expect me to believe that without some evidence? ' - as for being the first Christian to direct our attention to the wounds of Jesus. It is sometimes said that John's gospel is the most spiritual of the gospels but it can just as easily be described as the most physical. It begins by telling us that the Word became flesh and it ends telling us about the fleshliness of the Risen Lord, how physical a reality He is. The moment in which his flesh is opened and penetrated by the soldier's lance is of great significance: blood and water flowed out, as the one who witnessed it can testify. Thomas is invited to retrace the route of the lance.

The body of the Risen Lord is marked by the wounds of his passion. The damage done to him in the course of his life and death, the scars of his work, the abuse to which he was subjected - all of this can heal in some ways, it is even taken up into the glorification of his body, but it will always be there, it will always be a fact about the life lived in this body, the suffering endured by it. The story of that body's experience in this world is forever inscribed in its flesh. Thomas helps us to see that there is damage done to bodies that can never be undone, that there are wounds, weaknesses and imperfections that are still to be seen even in the glory of the Resurrection. Thomas sets it up for Jesus to teach us that by His wounds we are healed, because in His wounds He is glorious.

Vulnera means wounds, vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. Bodies that are only fantasies cannot be wounded or affected in any way, they cannot be touched, and are not susceptible to suffering. But Jesus shared in the suffering and endurance that comes in every human life. This is what bodies are capable of, suffering, endurance, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. This is what the glorified body of Jesus is gloriously capable of, touching and being touched, affecting and being affected. In other words, in his risen body, and more than ever, he is capable of loving.

We become expert at knowing the vulnerabilities of others and the more intimately we share life the more expert we are at this. We can exploit and abuse others, taking advantage of their vulnerability. But it is in wounds and in weakness, in limitation and in imperfection, that the work of grace is seen most clearly. The disciples realised this early, Paul most remarkably, that when we are weak we are strong, that God's grace is sufficient for our weakness, that God's weakness is more powerful than human strength and his foolishness wiser than human wisdom. The saints who are most useful to us are not the ones who are photoshop-perfect, whom we project into a place of super-human perfection. The saints who are most useful to us are the ones in whom we see God's grace shining gloriously through human weakness, in the first place the apostles themselves in their fragility and vulnerability, Peter who vacillates and Doubting Thomas.

We must look then to the wounds of Our Lord and also to our own wounds. These are places of suffering, but that means they are places that solicit love, for to love is to be vulnerable, touchable, open to sharing the sufferings of another. The body of the Risen Lord is the most beautiful, glorious, compelling, and seductive, body in creation. And it is so because in the Resurrection it remains a body capable of breathing and living, capable of touching and loving. We do not worship idols that are dead no matter how beautiful they seem. We worship the living and true God who shares our weakness so that we (even in our flesh) might share His glory.

Week 13 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Amos 5:14-15, 21-24; Psalm 49; Matthew 8:28-34

Deus humanissimus - God most human - is a phrase associated with the theological work of the Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx. It comes to mind in thinking about today's readings which present us with various kinds of monstrous creatures, surreal activities and confusing human behaviour. In the midst of so much distortion and confusion stands one who is simply and wholly human, one with a heart of flesh, Jesus, radiating truth and compassion.

Away with solemnities and feasts, says Amos, with holocausts and oblations, with fattened cattle and noisy liturgies. Today's passage is a short summary of things Amos says frequently and more stridently throughout his book. Why not be simply human, he asks, showing your religious devotion and your faith in God by living justly and practising goodness? It is how you treat other people that is most important. Let justice and goodness guide your actions and characterise your personality: they are simple things but preferred by God in place of elaborate ceremonies accompanied by the distortions of corruption and injustice.

The gospel reading then takes us into a world that is like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, weird and wonderful, surreal and unsettling, dark and twisted. The demoniacs are human beings but possessed by evil spirits and so they are not in their right minds, they are not simply human. The demons themselves are not human either of course and their agenda is to distort and fragment, to disturb the balance of creation, and to distract people from justice and goodness. The ways and means of doing this are not important, they will try anything, and many things work. Neither are the unfortunate swine human, innocent victims in this tale, carrying the curse of being classified as unclean in earlier parts of sacred scripture.

The swineherds, like the disciples in yesterday's reading, are out of their minds with fear, running away to tell everything that had happened, including what happened to the demoniacs. It is a strange gloss: one would have thought that the main thing they had to tell was what had happened to the demoniacs. Instead we are told that they told the whole story, they reported everything ... including what happened to the demoniacs.

The whole story - how far back did they go in telling the story? The story they have to tell is about Jesus. Paradoxically, the figure in the story who is simplest and most straightforward is the one who is most terrifying. Having received a full report, the whole town set out to meet him and as soon as they saw him they implored him to leave the neighbourhood! One would have thought that a neighbourhood familiar with demons, demoniacs and swine would have been able to bear the presence among them of one who is simply and wholly human. But it is not so. He is, it seems, the most fear provoking character in the story and they ask him to leave them alone. Whatever it is about him.

Among the strange and startling creatures that appear in these pages of the gospel, screaming demons and demented pigs, the would-be followers, the doubting disciples, the terrified townspeople - there is one who is fulfilling the plan of creation with integrity and clarity. His, in the words of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, is 'the right human face' and humankind cannot bear very much of that simple reality, of the judgment implied in it, of the holiness it reveals. Edwin Muir's poem is cool spring water compared with the distortions recounted in the scripture readings:

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face. / I in my mind had waited for this long,

Seeing the false and searching for the true, / Then found you as a traveller finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong / Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you, 

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste, / A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good, an eye / That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed, / The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea, / Not beautiful or rare in every part,

But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

- Edwin Muir, 'The Confirmation', published in The Narrow Place, 1943