Lent Week 1 Thursday

Readings: Esther 4:17; Psalm 138; Matthew 7:7-12

Esther is renowned for her beauty and for her courage. When we first hear of her we are told that out of all the young women in the kingdom, she catches the king's eye. She 'found favour in his sight': in other words she was the one he noticed out of all the candidates who wanted to be his consort. She must have been a woman of exceptional beauty.

Reading her story tells us that she was also a woman of exceptional courage. We know that perfect love casts out fear but we know also that our love is never perfect. So something of fear remains. And there can even be a heightened fear in relation to those we love, of disappointing them, of offending them, of wounding them. Great love is compatible then with great fear, not with the servile and self-centred fear of punishment which is cast out by love, but with the kind of fear we experience in the presence of great beauty, real holiness, undeniable goodness. A fear that is a kind of awe.

Courage is not a virtue that removes fear but a virtue that enables us to do what is right in spite of fear. We remain afraid even in the moment in which we act courageously. And we see this in the power of Esther's prayer, part of which is read as today's first reading. She is not so much afraid of God as she is afraid of her husband: she needs to take her life in her hands, and risk his wrath, if she is to intercede for the people.

But she does it, she is given words with which to pray. 'Save us from the hand of our enemies', she says, 'turn our mourning into gladness and our sorrows into wholeness'. Deliver us from evil.

Jesus encourages us to have the same attitude of confidence and trust in the Father. We should turn to him in prayer even when we are afraid and apprehensive, when we find it awesome and intimidating. Ask, seek, knock. If you cannot find words use the words of Esther, or the words of Job, or the words of the Psalms, above all the words Jesus taught us. They all speak already of the things for which we want to pray.

We should be practising prayer and this is the only way to learn it. We are already over a week into Lent and it is one of the main purposes of this season, to get back to prayer, to do it more regularly, to give more time and energy to it. We may need courage first, if we feel oppressed by our sins, disappointed at the state of our soul. We may need to go to confession in order to lift that oppression and banish that disappointment. And then we can pray with courage again.

And we must remember our neighbour in our prayers. Jesus will not let us take refuge in an egocentric spiritual life, a self-centred cultivation of 'holiness'. 'Do to others whatever you would have them do to you', he says in today's gospel. 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us', he says in the Our Father. Her love for her people gives Esther the courage to speak, firstly to God, and then to the king. When we too are moved by the great need of others we will find it easy to pray, the words will come. We will find also the courage not only to speak to God but to face into whatever it is human need asks of us.

Lent Week 1 Wednesday

Readings: Jonah 3:1-10; Ps 50/51; Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? For Luke, the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites 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 greater here 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 for Luke the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people is the sign. 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.)

Lent is a time of mutual repentance, then, as we turn our hearts to the Father knowing that the Father’s heart is turned towards us. We can be certain of God’s repentance, of God’s willingness to show mercy. Just as God saw from their actions that the Ninevites were turning from their sin, so we have seen from God’s actions that he is turned towards us. What about us then? We must show by our actions that we are answering Jesus’ call to repentance. In helping us to answer that call the Father has given us not just the sign of Jonah but the sign of Jesus.

You can hear this homily being preached here.

Lent Week 1 Tuesday

Readings: Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 33; Matthew 6:7-15

The passage from Isaiah is one of the shortest but also one of the most beautiful used in the Church's liturgy. The word that goes forth from the mouth of God does not return to Him empty. So the word is to return to its source. The word is therefore on a mission. It is spoken not simply in order to reverberate through the heavens in ever widening circles. It is spoken, like rain and snow, to make contact with creation, to water the earth and make it fruitful, providing seed and food.

The word that is spoken, how will it return, with what fruit, having generated what kind of life? It seems that it will return with other words, that it will return with the echoes it has generated, that it will return with the changes it has brought about, that it will return with the relationships it has established. Words do all these things, they echo, they invite other words in response, they change things, they establish and confirm relationships.

Reading this passage, as we do today, along with the passage from Matthew where Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father, leads us into a deeper meditation on the word, words, and the Word. For in the Our Father we are given the best possible human words with which to echo the Father's address to us. Any word we utter that is in any way true or good is an echo of the word of truth and goodness that establishes creation and speaks to us through it. But now He has spoken to us through His Word, and that Word, the Incarnate Lord, gives us human words that enable us not just to echo God's truth and goodness but to participate in His conversation with the Father.

'Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him'. Prayer is one of the works of Lent not because it is meant to be penitential and tedious but because it is the heart of what we are about as Christian believers. Prayer is the way in which we participate in the exchange, the conversation, taking place between the Father and the Son. The Father speaks and the Word is spoken. The Father is the source of all being and life and understanding and is only adequately received and understood by the eternal Son, is only adequately appreciated and loved by the Son in the Spirit.

The Our Father is the translation of the Word into words. Here is the rain and snow that will water the earth, softening our hearts, focusing our minds, generating life and love in us. We are invited to enter the great circling that is the mission of the Word, spoken from all eternity in creation, sent in time to redeem creation, returning to the Father having accomplished what He was sent to do. We 'jump onto' this great movement by saying the Our Father, making those words our own. When they have become the truthful expression of our minds and wills then we have found our place as adopted children of the Father. In Jesus Christ we hear the Father's Word. In speaking the words He taught us we become the loving servants of the Word of God. We enter into the mind and will of Christ, we join the chorus of praise and intercession of which He is the leader, we are converted and return home to the Father in whom we come home also to ourselves.

Lent Week 1 Monday

Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 11-18; Ps 18/19; Matthew 25:31-46

To this famous scene of the last judgement, of the separation of sheep and goats, one could ask: what human being is there who has not at some point helped another? and what human being is there who has not at some point failed to help another? So the important teaching here is not a moralistic one and we must take something else from it. What we must take from it is its teaching about Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters: in serving one another we are serving him.

The Lenten triangle of prayer-almsgiving-fasting is at the service of the Christian triangle of God-others-self: this is the network of relationships in which we live our lives if we try to live them according to the great commandment of loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.

Who is the needy one? The answer from this gospel is very clear as it lists the basic needs of humanity and the works of mercy that attend to those needs. But the experience of a community such as l'Arche, for example, obliges us to think again about 'ability' and 'disability', about 'need' and 'strength'. There we learn about the ability of the disabled (for love, honesty, trust, for example) and the disability of the able-bodied (concerning love, honesty, trust, for example).

So the question of who is the least of Christ's brothers and sisters is re-opened. It seems that the answer is: everybody at some time or in some way. In caring for anybody who needs care we are caring for Christ. Sometimes care needed requires corporal works of mercy, looking after physical needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Sometimes it is spiritual works of mercy that are required: encouragement, accompaniment, forgiveness, listening. Along the way of love taught us by Christ we discover our own neediness and our own strength.

Lent Week 1 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Psalm 50; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

The things to which the devil tempted Jesus are all things which he will do later but he will do them for his Father's sake and not at the invitation of Satan. In the miracles of feeding and in the mystery of the Eucharist he makes bread for the hungry. In the recklessness of his passion he throws himself completely on the care of his Father and the angels, and is supported even to the point of being raised from the dead. Raised up on the cross on the hill of Calvary, he will reign over all the kingdoms of the world, a sovereignty confirmed in his ascension to the right hand of the Father. He shows that he is the Son of God but he does it not on the devil's terms, as a work of pride and self-assertion, but simply out of love for his Father, in response to the Father's will known through prayer.

Although we are tempted to read the story of Adam and Eve as crude and primitive, we are warned that the serpent was subtle above all the beasts of the earth. So the devil presents Jesus not with the opposite of what his mission is about but with a simulacrum, something so close to what his mission is about that it might just work. 'If you are the Son of God ...' is an open question, seductive and non-judgmental. There is always a truth in what the devil promises: 'you will not die' - well not immediately, or perhaps not physically, yet, but certainly in your relationship with God. The temptations then are to something true about the mission of Jesus but on the devil's terms and so distorted and perverted.

These temptations of Jesus which we read about each year on the First Sunday of Lent are paradigmatic in two ways. Firstly they summarize all the temptations experienced by Jesus in the course of his life. The possibilities presented to him here are always present: the temptation to work wonders and so convince the people rather than inviting them and guiding them to a sincere obedience; the temptation to avoid casting himself completely on the Father's care ('let this cup pass me by') and so pull back from the task entrusted to him; the temptation to be another kind of king ('get behind me, Satan') and so betray fundamentally those who saw in him the possibility of a real salvation. They are also paradigmatic as the temptations of 'everyman': are we really to put God first in our lives without being distracted by desires for self-preservation, for power, for being something in the eyes of other people rather than in the eyes of God? Do we really love God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole strength?

The devil invites Jesus to act now rather than to wait. It is always another aspect of giving in to temptation: we anticipate, jump the gun and try to lay hold on what is to be given to us. Grabbing the gift we destroy its character as gift and our attention turns away from the Giver.  Our interest becomes God's gifts rather than the giver of those gifts. When we give in to temptation, we translate God back into the provider of food, the giver of security and identity, a power we try to manipulate. The devil invites us to take control of our lives, to be mature and grown up, to make decisions for ourselves (informed about their consequences by the devil!), to turn away from God's apparently arbitrary 'rules and regulations' in order to construct a world that seems good to us, a world better than the one God seems to be struggling to manage. And what a mess we make.

The garden, meant to be a delightful place for the lover and his beloved, becomes a wilderness. The temple, meant to be a place of prayer for all the nations, becomes a den of thieves. The mountain, meant to be a place from which to see more and to see better, becomes noisy and confused. These places of the encounter with God - the wilderness, the temple, the mountain - are always also places of testing. The devil has most interest in the places where human beings seek to engage with God. But through the tender mercy of God the wilderness becomes a place from which new life comes, a place in which the people learn once more to walk with God. The prophets spoke about this and Jesus fulfills it. Through the radical renewal of its meaning and purpose the temple becomes again the place of true sacrifice, the place in which we can be sure of God's presence, and the temple is now the Body of Christ. From the miserable hill of Golgotha, through his death on the cross, Jesus gives the world the perspective in which all things are to be evaluated, all life and love, all sin and death, all aspiration and failure. On the cross, as St Augustine says, Jesus teaches ex cathedra - to all the kingdoms of the world he gives the full, final, and eternally authoritative teaching about sin and about love.

The accounts of his temptations teach us that Jesus is the second Adam. He is Everyman, he is Israel. He is faithful to the creed of Israel not just reciting the words of that creed, but making those words actual. So he does not forget God when he is full or hungry. He will not worship any other God. He will not claim kingship over the nations until it be given to him. It is not yet time for the devil's strategically tentative question to be answered, 'if you are the Son of God ...' But in God's good time it will be answered, in the fulness of time, when the hour has come. Then all men and women will see the salvation of our God, all men and women will be invited to share its joy, to reign in life through Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and the Son of God.

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 58:9-14; Psalm 86; Luke 5:27-32

A first thought: the category 'righteous' is empty (or at least has just one member) and so the call to repentance is universal: it is for 'the many', 'the generality', 'humankind'.

A second thought: Luke adds that the sinners are called to 'repentance', metanoia. So it is not just a case of saying, 'ah sure aren't we all sinners and isn't God good'. There is a call to follow Jesus, to change our lives by being with him. The tax-collectors and sinners know they need his presence, the Pharisees do not realise this need.

A third thought: let's reverse the question so that it is not 'why are you eating with tax-collectors and sinners' but 'why are tax-collectors and sinners eating with you'? Does it make any difference? Is the change too subtle to mean anything? Here is the difference: that we see sin and evil in relation to good, not the other way round. Our point of reference is not the bad and how we might avoid it (or them) but is the good and how we might lose it (or them) - or Him.

A fourth thought: fasting and praying, two of the works of Lent, could be done in a way that is just personal and private, concerned with the cultivation of my own soul. This is easy to see in the case of fasting. As regards prayer St James warns us that we can ask wrongly, where we ask in order to spend God's gifts on our passions. Almsgiving obliges us to look outside ourselves and presents us with this question: 'what boundaries do I set for my world'? We cannot share our bread with the hungry without opening to a bigger world than that of our own ego, even if (especially if) it is an ego that aspires to being 'spiritual' or even 'holy'.

Friday after Ash Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9; Psalm 51; Matthew 9:14-15

With a range of imagery the Bible speaks about a choice presented by the Word of God to those who hear it.

According to the Book of Deuteronomy, in a passage read at Mass yesterday, the choice to observe the commandments of God or not to observe them is a choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse. For much of the 'wisdom literature' the choice, expressed in how we relate to others and to God, is between walking in the way of wisdom or descending the path of foolishness. Paul contrasts life according to the Spirit and life according to the flesh, while John is fond of the imagery of light and darkness.

In his preaching Jesus speaks bluntly of this choice. It means choosing between a narrow gate opening onto a hard road and an easy and broad road which, however,  leads to perdition (Matt 7:13-14). Today's gospel puts it even more starkly: we must choose between wishing to save our lives which means losing them, and losing our lives for Christ's sake, which means saving them.

Today's first reading give us a physical and very concrete image for the choice we face between these two contrasting ways of living: the clenched fist and the open hand.

Think of the difference between being confronted with a clenched fist and being offered an open hand. The clenched fist signifies threat, rejection, arrogance, exclusion, refusal, anger and violence. The open hand means friendship, help, peace, sharing, communication and connection.

In today's first reading Isaiah encourages his listeners to 'do away with the yoke, the clenched fist, the wicked word', and to do it by 'sharing your bread with the hungry and clothing the man you see to be naked'. Psalm 111 develops the idea: 'the good man takes pity and lends ... is generous, merciful and just ... open-handed he gives to the poor.'

Where the clenched fist is ungenerous, unreceptive and closes things down, the open hand is generous, welcoming and vulnerable.

The crucified Christ opened his hands and arms and heart on the cross to give us the definitive revelation of God. This heart open to the world contains a love beyond all expectation and beyond any natural hope, a love beyond any singing or telling of it. The God who opens wide his hand to satisfy the desires of all who live (Ps 145) has now opened wide his heart to bring to eternal life all whom He has chosen (Eph 1:11).

There may be many reasons why, at times, we choose the way of the clenched fist rather than the open hand: hurt and disappointment, tiredness and indifference, fear and misunderstanding, selfishness and disdain.

Whatever the reasons, the clenched fist always involves turning from our own kin and denying, in effect, that others are of the same kin. The open hand, however, means turning towards others as our kin, fellow human creatures, brothers and sisters, children of the same heavenly Father sharing a common call and a common hope.

Just as the presence of salt and light cannot be hidden and their absence will be noticed, the kindness of the good person cannot be denied and the shock of the clenched fist will stop us in our tracks. The good works of the open-handed shine forth so that people might praise the Father for the holiness they glimpse in His creatures. We have come to know that this is what God is like, causing his sun to rise on bad as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest as on dishonest people (Matt 5:45).

One of the three works of Lent is almsgiving, opening our hearts and hands to our neighbour, especially to the poor neighbour in any kind of need. So Lent is a time to practise making the move from the clenched fist to the open hand. Are we to turn in and close ourselves away, hardening our heart and clenching our fist? Or are we to follow Christ by opening our hands and our hearts, by reaching out to others in generosity and justice? What is the point in opening our hands in prayer to God, what is the point of penance and discipline, if we do not lend a hand of kindness to our brothers and sisters in their need?