Week 26 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Ezekiel 18:25-28; Psalm 25; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

The answer to Jesus’ question seems obvious: the one who did the Father’s will was the first son. Although at first he said he would not do it, he did it and the Father will clearly be more pleased with a son who says he won’t but then does rather than with a son who says he will but then does not.

It is the common teaching of Jesus elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel and throughout the New Testament. ‘Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (Matt 7:21). He is the one who builds his house on rock, hearing the words of Jesus and doing them. The foolish person also hears the words of Jesus but does not do them (Matt 7:24,26). Whoever does the will of his Father is, says Jesus, his brother and sister and mother (Matt 12:50).

James in his letter tells us to be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving ourselves (James 1.22). Paul talks about faith working through love as the essential activity of the Christian (Gal 5:6) and John in his first letter says that our love must not be simply in word and speech but in truth and in actions (I Jn 3:18).

So that’s all very clear – hypocrisy is a bad thing. Our thoughts and words must be consistent with our actions but if we have to choose between them then it is our actions that are most important. A follower of Christ is seen in how people act not in what they think or say. The saints are those who have ‘done love’ rather than simply admired it or preached it.

In the context of today’s liturgy, of course, the gospel parable is set in a slightly different context. The first reading allows for the possibility of people moving in and out of doing the Father’s will. The one who is a sinner can change to become law-abiding and honest. But the one who is law-abiding and honest can renounce his integrity to become a sinner. God is perfectly just, Ezekiel says, and will treat us according to where we have positioned ourselves: the sinner will die and the honest person will live.

An obvious question though is: when have we positioned ourselves definitively. The text of Ezekiel itself encourages us to think that we can be rescued from sin just as we might lose our integrity and fall into sin. For the New Testament, to have received the gift of the Spirit is to be definitively on the side of Christ, to have been baptised is to have been born again to a new life having died once and for all to sin.

But we know from our own experience – and Christian tradition has acknowledged it – that people do fall away even into serious sin and then, by God’s grace, are drawn back, become contrite and are reconciled to the Church. Not that we can be baptised all over again but the Church has the sacrament of reconciliation. That sacrament is a restoration of the new life of baptism in the one who has squandered it.

Traditionally death has been regarded as the moment when a person is definitively positioned in relation to God’s will, is fixed either as a sinner or as a person of integrity. The older ones among us will remember stories of very good people who commit one mortal sin and are then killed by a bus and it’s off to hell with them for all eternity. That always seemed a bit too simple, as if God had no memory and no understanding of human fickleness. And of course there is a lot more about this in the tradition. Most recently Edith Stein – Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – has written about God’s infinite patience and how it will find a way, respecting human freedom, to outwit the stubborn human will and seduce us (as Jeremiah would say) into the love of God which is what we’ve really wanted all along in spite of ourselves.

And there is also that great second reading from the Letter to the Philippians. We are to have the same mind as Christ Jesus, literally we are to be mindful in the way he was or we are to be practically wise in the way he was. This is what the term used means referring not so much to the mind of Christ as to his mindfulness, his way of being in relation to the Father.

What is being held up to us here is an even more radical possibility where the distinction between what I want and what the Father wants dissolves, or at least is of no further significance. So the gap between saying I will do it and actually doing it disappears and we have the possibility of a third son, the one who both says and does the Father’s will. This is perfectly found, of course, only in Jesus whom we believe to be without sin. Sin continues to distract and disturb us. Sin maintains the gap between our saying and our doing. But our destination is to have the same mindfulness as Jesus: it is where the Spirit is leading us.

The Spirit is the Spirit of love and to become involved in the love of God is to be on a road that will take us to the place where our will is emptied of its own desires … or better put our will has as its fundamental desire simply the will of the Father whom we love so that we do not need to be told ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ but we are taught interiorly by the prompting of the Spirit. ‘You do not need anyone to teach you’, John says in his first letter (2:27). ‘They will all know me and no longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother’, God says through Jeremiah, in what he says about the new covenant (31:31).

This following of Christ is not a magical thing, however, because it involves what Paul calls ‘the labour of love’. We see that labour most dramatically in the agony in the garden, where the Son is wrestling with what the Father’s will demands of him. ‘Let this cup pass me by’ is what the Son wants. ‘Let your will not mine be done’ is also what the Son wants. This is his deepest desire, to do what the Father wants, to bring his human will into line with the will of the Father and to cross that most difficult of gaps between knowing what is good and assenting to it, and being able actually to carry it out, to see it through.

We have the consolation of his struggle and his example. We have the help of the Holy Spirit, the love of God that has been poured into our hearts to make us the loving children of God also.

You can listen to this homily being preached here.

Week 25 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 11.9-12.8; Psalm 90; Luke 9.43b-45

There's one verse in Mark's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 32, which summarises what Luke says here, over a longer passage. The disciples were astonished, and those who followed him were afraid. The disciples are those who followed him, and those who followed him are the disciples, and they are both astonished and afraid.

There's an emotional rollercoaster which they experience in trying to stay with Jesus. One moment they're full of admiration, full of amazement, full of wonder at what he does. The next moment they're afraid, they're silent because of what he says.

They find his deeds amazing, they find his words disturbing. But Jesus says to them, these words must sink into your ears, it's a strange saying. Another translation has it, you must have them constantly in mind.

Jesus is alerting us to something we know from experience, that there are different levels of hearing. We can hear things at many different levels. Physically we might hear what a person is saying to us, but in our hearts and in our lives, somewhere deeper down, we decide we don't want to hear what we have just heard.

We don't want to allow that truth in. We choose very often not to understand. Fear of the truth, or the implications of the truth, or the demands of the truth, will often prevent us from asking more, from saying, what is it you just said? Is there more that needs to be said about what you have just said? It is a fear of the truth, a fear of the consequences and demands of the truth, which will in many circumstances, enable us to turn a deaf ear, shut down, to shut down our hearing, so that even though we hear things physically, we do not hear them in our hearts, or in our minds, or in our lives.

It seems to me that a sure sign that this is where the disciples are, in this passage of Luke, is there when we read on, next day an argument broke out among them about who was the greatest. It's a classic kind of deflection of emotional energy and attention onto something else, having decided that they do not want to hear what Jesus is saying to them, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of men. Their energy goes elsewhere, and they start fighting with each other.

Our journey of discipleship will presumably be like that. We will move around between amazement on the one hand, fear on the other, and then confusion, as we find ourselves unable to allow the truth of Jesus' words to sink into our ears, to be constantly in our minds, to find a home in our hearts. Perfect love casts out fear, we're told in the first letter of St. John.

Perfect love casts out fear, and then we can receive the truth. When we are free from fear, we can receive the truth and allow his words to sink into our ears, into our hearts, and into our lives. Perfect love allows us to accept the consequences and the demands of the truth.

But for most of us, that's a destination yet to be attained, a goal towards which we try to move and pray that someday, with God's grace, we will be there. We try to persevere, growing in courage as we go along, allowing the words of Jesus to make their home in us. It is easy from time to time to be amazed and to wonder at his deeds.

It is much more difficult, much more disturbing, much more demanding to allow the words of Jesus to sink into our ears, to find their way into our minds and into our hearts, to find their way into our lives. It is only with the help of his grace that such a thing is possible, that we can grow into that perfect love which casts out fear and so enables us to receive and to rejoice in the truth. And to live from that truth, the truth of his words, which have come to dwell in us.

Week 25 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11; Psalm 144; Luke 9:18-22

As so often in St Luke's gospel Jesus is at prayer before making a key decision or asking a decisive question. Here it is the familiar question, 'who do you say that I am'? Coming as it does directly from the heart of his prayer (in solitude, with the disciples) it seems that this must also have been his prayer's content. Many human beings all over the world are probably doing this right now, praying to God about their vocation: who am I? what is it you want me to do? who is it you want me to be?

In his humanity Jesus also prays about this question. The issue had arisen already in his experience of the temptations (Luke 4): in fact those temptations can be understood as pervading the whole of his public ministry, questions about who he is and what his mission is, questions he put to his disciples, having first, presumably, put them to himself and to the Father in prayer.

He seems embarrassed by the response of Peter, rebuking the disciples and commanding them to tell this to no one. 'The Christ of God' is Peter's answer but Jesus continues by speaking about 'the Son of Man who must suffer many things, be rejected, killed and be raised'. It must be that it is a matter of the right time, or, to be more precise, of the wrong time. What is the problem? He is engaged in teaching them something very delicate as he appropriates for himself the teaching he is sharing with them. What kind of Christ is he to be? When is the right time for speaking more explicitly and more publicly about the answer that is emerging? Not now, it seems, not for the moment.

Human wisdom and prudence are often seen in good timing: what to do or say can be clear, the challenge is to find the right time, the right set of circumstances, in which to say or do it. For teaching the wisdom of the cross, the hard paradoxical wisdom of the gospel, when is the time right and when are the circumstances favourable? We might say never, it will always be challenging to teach that wisdom. Or we might say 'the fulness of time' is the right time for teaching this wisdom, a kairos moment in the life of each individual, a moment of grace and understanding, when the knowledge of the cross can be received not just as reasonable and intelligible, but as desirable and infinitely wise.

Week 25 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; Psalm 90; Luke 9:7-9

At the end of some readings from the Bible it can feel very strange to say 'this is the Word of the Lord / thanks be to God'. Today's first reading is an example, the famous 'vanity of vanities' passage at the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth). What is the point? Where is it all going? Days come and go, months and years, there is nothing new under the sun, we wear ourselves out, have nothing to show for it, and in a hundred years time what difference will it have made?

The monastic tradition in Christianity has given us reflections on the seven or eight deadly sins or principal vices among which we find sloth or acedia, a kind of listlessness in which everything seems pointless and meaningless. Evagrius of Pontus is one of the monastic teachers who writes about these sins or vices which he calls 'thinkings', or 'thoughts'. Logismoi is his Greek term, we would perhaps use the term 'fantasies'. They refer to things we find insinuating themselves into our minds, mixtures of thought and feeling that distract, disturb, darken, and fragment. From different directions they take away our serenity and peacefulness. With acedia specifically we lose a sense of purpose and energy, things come to seem pointless.

The sun plays an important role in all this. Ecclesiastes speaks of human toil and effort under the sun. The sun rises and sets as day unendingly follows day. Is there anything new under the sun? Acedia was also called 'the noonday devil', noon being the time when the sun is at its highest and hottest, the time of day when this problem is most acute. But Evagrius says the problems start at 10.00am and goes on until 2.00pm! The monk looks out his window, wondering whether the sun is moving at all. When will it be 3.00pm? Perhaps there was food, or a break, at 3.00pm. Or perhaps it was just that the heat of the sun has eased by then.

Anybody who has lived through a Roman summer will have some idea of the effect of intense heat day after day. There is a story of a Scottish Cardinal who claimed that it was impossible to commit a sin when the scirocco was blowing in Rome, the hot wind from the Sahara, on the grounds that nobody could think straight in such conditions.

So what is the solution to acedia? It is not clear that the spiritual masters who wrote about it - Evagrius, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Aquinas - have any easy solution. Perhaps it is enough good news to know that this human experience is recognised and acknowledged in the Bible and in Christian traditions of spirituality. Whatever its roots - physical, emotional, intellectual - it seems to be a universal and perennial human experience.

One solution is to bring ourselves, again and again, into our present reality and to remind ourselves that the life of the Spirit is flowing in us for the 'here and now', with these actual people, and through these actual responsibilities. Acedia will tell us that we would be happier if things were different (so we re-arrange the furniture in the room), or if we knew more (so we buy yet another book on the spiritual life), or if we lived with different people (so we think about living in another community or perhaps we should have married a different person), or if we lived at a different time (so we fantasise about living in other countries at other times). But our faith is incarnational, about here and now, and these people, and these responsibilities which are mine today. We are to find meaning - and a meaning deeper than all our imaginings - in the experiences that are ours today: this is what faith assures us. Sometimes we 'feel' this re-assurance, have a lively sense of it, but often we don't, in which case we keep going, placing our trust in the One in whom we believed and continuing to serve Him as best we can.

It is good to know that this experience is recognised and acknowledged in the Bible, in the liturgy of the Church and in our traditions of spirituality. Thomas Aquinas adds a thought of his own about acedia: it is called the noon-day devil, he says, because the mid-point of any work is a difficult moment. It is as if every important human undertaking will encounter a moment of 'mid-life crisis'. Is it too late to turn back? The end is not yet in sight. Was it a mistake to begin in the first place? Like Peter walking on the water we need to keep our eyes on the One who is calling us, the End of our journey. Whether we are afflicted by doubt or oppressed by acedia, keep looking to him, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the sun of justice who assigns us our daily tasks in the service of his kingdom.

Week 25 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Proverbs 30:5-9; Psalm 119; Luke 9:1-6

The readings speak of two different kinds of trust in God. The reading from Proverbs asks God to arrange the circumstances so that I will not be faced with the temptations that come from being either rich or poor. If I am rich I may forget God, if I am poor I may curse God. It is one way of trusting in God, to believe that he will arrange things so that I am protected from such temptations. If he takes care of the circumstances, I will be able to manage, I will live well.

The other kind of trust is clear in the gospel reading. The Twelve are 'entrusted' with authority and power to teach and heal. They are to be grown up children of God, responsible and taking initiatives. They are not now to be dependent on God to arrange congenial circumstances for them. Rather do they trust God to give them a share of His Spirit so that they will be able to engage appropriately with whatever circumstances they encounter.

They are to be co-workers, sharing in the Lord's ministry of teaching, healing and casting out demons. They are not guaranteed favourable circumstances. Their dependence and trust in God is deeper. It is internal rather than external, to do with what they are becoming in their hearts and minds rather than with the external situations and relationships in which they find themselves.

Saint Paul speaks very well of this second kind of trust in his letter to the Philippians: 'I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me' (4:11-13).

Saint Matthew - 21 September

Readings: Ephesians 4.1-7, 11-13; Psalm 8; Matthew 9.9-13

In 2021 the Dominicans celebrated 800 years since the death of Saint Dominic who died on 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, in the year 1221. The theme chosen for this jubilee year was 'At Table with Saint Dominic', taken from the very earliest picture of Dominic, called the 'Mascarella table', a painting on a refectory table made just a few years after Dominic's canonization in 1234. It shows Dominic sitting at table with forty-eight other friars and is quite unique among icons of medieval saints.

The painting lends himself to some helpful interpretations: Dominic is represented not as a saint exalted on a pedestal but as a brother among his brothers, the experience of being 'at table' with others is a rich theme for reflection, and so too is the variety of tables at which we sit with him - the table of fraternity, of the Word, of study, of government, and so on.

To be at table with another is to be on some kind of intimate terms with them, to be part of their circle, invited to join with them and with their family and companions in friendship and communion. It is our normal way of sealing and celebrating friendship, love and marriage, alliances and reunions, conferences and negotiations - to sit together for a meal.

Hence the strong reaction of the Pharisees to the fact of Jesus sitting at table with tax-collectors and sinners. He has just called Matthew, one of those tax-collectors, to become a disciple and he will eventually be one of the four evangelists. In the end he records another kind of transaction and engages in another kind of administration, the economy of salvation as enacted by Jesus and the beginnings of the Church.

To be at table with tax-collectors and sinners is to share intimacy with them. It says to the world 'we belong together', 'we are in relationship', 'there is peace and communion between us'. This is what shocks the Pharisees. Jesus's response to them is well known: it is not the healthy who need the doctor but the sick, what the Father wants is mercy not sacrifice, love and compassion towards human beings whatever their circumstances and not religious observances.

We are all called to sit at table with Jesus, called to the Eucharist. It is the table of God's Word and the table at which we are fed on Christ's Body and Blood. Between us there is intimacy and peace, communion in a shared life. Nobody is worthy of this invitation, of course, and yet the invitation is for everybody.

Paul speaks of this call in the first reading and points us to the heavenly table, the table of the Blessed Trinity, so beautifully represented in the famous icon of the Trinity by Rublev.  The table of the Blessed Trinity is our ultimate destination. We can read the Trinity into the phrases Paul uses - there is one God who is over all, through all and in all, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, working to build the body of Christ in the world, the Church, through the gifts he bestows on those who believe in him.

We sit at this table already when we participate in the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Son. There he gives his life so that tax-collectors and sinners, and Pharisees too, might grow in their knowledge of God and in their likeness to the one who feeds them, the 'perfect man', Christ. He is the Brother among brothers and sisters, sharing the Father's love with all who join him at his table. Let us join him there today and be strengthened in the call we have received.

Week 25 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9; Psalm 145; Philippians 1:20-24, 27; Matthew 20:1-16

As humanity becomes ever more sophisticated in technology, in science, in communications, and so on, it sometimes seems as if it stays fixed morally and spiritually, at an infantile stage of development. when we see the level of political debate at present, the absence of good leaders, the increasing influence of the most basic human emotions - greed, envy, fear, rivalry - and the appeal being made to them by the leaders we do have - it can seem that we are living Lord of the Flies except with computers, drones, and nuclear weapons. We have good reason to be apprehensive and fearful - which further feeds the way in which politics is being played at present.

The instinctive reaction to today's parable - that those who spent the whole day working should receive more than those who only worked the last hour, or else that these latter should receive less - comes from that base level of understanding and feeling. There is a kind of justice in it, we will feel. The landowner's decision to pay everyone the same seems like a too simplistic, a too univocally mathematical, understanding of equality. Or perhaps it is we who want to apply a too univocally mathematical an understanding - equal pay for equal work, more pay for more work, less pay for less work. How else can things be done fairly?

One difficulty with that - as the landowner points out - is that it leaves no room for generosity but the gain there is in that exclusion is that it leaves no room either for envy and so might head off at least some of the reasons why human beings are so violent. All is clear when it is a matter of Xa for X1, Xb for X2, etc. Is the landowner a patronising capitalist, wanting to show off somehow, throw his wealth around, sow division, provoke envy, keep the workers of the world divided?

How can there be a place for generosity and gift - for grace - where a certain kind of iron mathematics determines how 'equality' is to be understood? How honour diversity at the same time as respecting equality? How leave space for the requirements of fraternity alongside those of equality?

The needs of human beings are basically the same and in important ways varied. Can we imagine that the landowner is applying the criterion - known in early Christianity and in monastic communities - 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need'? Or will such an ideal always be subverted by the baser emotions, especially envy, which will always see it as a kind of injustice, a kind of discrimination. Which it is, in favour of meeting human needs.

Putting the first reading from Isaiah 55 alongside the parable encourages us to interpret it along these lines - the landowner being 'God', his ways and thoughts not our ways and thoughts. Why be envious (angry, jealous, resentful ... sexist, racist, etc.) because God is generous (also in his creativity, spontaneity, freedom, in his delight in difference and variety and multiplicity, etc.)

The Lord is close to all who call him, the psalm says, ready to be found. But how ready are we to live in his kingdom? Is the 'first Adam' in us still so powerful - and we see it in the infantile passions that determine so much of human behaviour - that we are not even at the beginning of understanding the thoughts and ways of generosity and grace? What new way of seeing, what new way of thinking, do we need if we are to understand the economics of that kingdom, the value of each person, whether it comes to our attention in the dawning light of that kingdom's day or in the evening when the time of judgement has come nearer?